4/19/19 Matt Taibbi on This Generation’s ‘WMD’

Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been hacked.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, bitch, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, on the line, I got Matt Taibbi from Rolling Stone.
He also wrote a bunch of stuff going way backwards.
Insane Clown President, The Great Derangement, I Can't Breathe.
I'd like to read that and learn about that one.
Griftopia, Hate, Inc. is the new one.
Of course, he wrote all that stuff for Rolling Stone about the financial crisis and all kinds of great stuff.
Goldman Sachs, if you guys like Goldman Sachs, put that in your search terms with Taibbi here.
The new one is Hate, Inc.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Matt?
How are you doing, Scott?
I'm doing real good.
Happy to have you here.
Hey, before we talk about Hate, Inc., can I ask you about the new one, Untitled Gate?
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, so I got called out a little bit on Fox News.
I've been writing about the Russiagate thing sporadically from the beginning.
And I was one of the few reporters in the kind of sort of liberal media universe who didn't think it was kosher from the beginning.
And, you know, I was skeptical about many aspects of it.
And a few weeks ago, before Barr released his letter, I put out this very long thing about how the press had screwed up from the beginning and had gotten many things wrong.
It was a pretty exhaustive kind of review of what we had gotten wrong.
And Laura Logan on Fox News basically said, well, that's all well and good, but why don't you do the job of actually being an investigative reporter and looking into what actually happened and what Russiagate was and whether there was impropriety by the government.
So I'm going to do that.
I'm going to take that sort of challenge up and spend the next year or so looking into it.
And the reason it's called Untitled Gate is because I really don't know what the story is yet.
And when I get a better sense of it, I might change the title.
But for right now, it's kind of up in the air.
You know, I'm only just starting.
I'll tell you, you wrote one interesting thing.
One very interesting thing in your mass email that you sent out to your list there about this was that even though we're told that this all began not with the Steele dossier, but with Papadopoulos running his mouth and this and that, which even that seems like a frame up from new information coming out.
I don't know.
But never mind that.
But anyway, you say that you're hearing it began long before that, maybe months before that.
Is that right?
Yeah, maybe even before that.
I mean, there's some things there's some things that came out in the Mueller report yesterday that are suggestive.
I think, you know, it's the best way to put it, that the investigation started earlier.
This is a very complicated story, and it involves areas of both journalism and law and law enforcement that are unusual and for which there are not many experts.
So, you know, what's the propriety of using an FBI informant to gather information about a political campaign?
I actually don't know the answer to that question.
And if you right now, the atmosphere is so politicized that if you call a lawyer, if he's a Democrat, he's going to tell you one thing.
If he's a Republican, he's going to tell you another.
And so it's very it's a very difficult situation from a reporter standpoint to kind of figure out what's going on and what what's legal and what isn't.
And what's what's proper and what isn't.
But, you know, so there's obstacles with this case.
Yeah.
Well, I like the way you talked about.
Well, I forget which thing it was you that I was reading.
We talked about how, hey, when I was studying about Goldman Sachs, I went interviewed so many different lawyers and bankers and everybody.
I couldn't I asked him as many questions I could until I finally really felt like I understood the thing at the root level, you know, because you didn't come in there with a financial degree or this kind of thing.
It wasn't your experience, but you want to get to the bottom of it.
So it took that much work.
And I was thinking, I really hope you take on the nature of the hacks themselves here and give a real hard look to Bill Binney, the former NSA guy.
And his story must have been a thumb drive and all of that.
You know about that?
Yeah, no, I've talked to some of the VIPs guys and, you know, they have a really interesting history that, you know, has gone kind of underreported in the press.
They, you know, their disagreements with people like Michael Hayden going back, you know, to the before 9-11.
But, you know, you're absolutely right.
One of the problems that reporters have when you're doing a story is, you know, we typically enter a field with a knowledge level that's either zero or close to zero.
So the more technical and arcane the subject is, the more people you have to talk to.
And you can't really feel comfortable about the topic until, you know, even small things like where are the buildings?
Who sits where?
You know, who are the important people in the bureaucracy?
Like who is more, do the people in the NSA defer to the people in the CIA?
How does it work?
Like you have to be comfortable with all those things like they're second nature.
And it takes a long time to be able to get to the point where you can say all those things.
So I think that's some of the advantages that reporters who, you know, have longstanding relationships with intelligence agencies have.
But the problem is that those tend to be the reporters who gave the sort of unfettered versions of this that turned out to be untrue.
So it's a problem.
Yeah.
In other words, you get close enough to learn enough to really be expert to report on it.
You end up finding yourself an embedded reporter reporting the point of view of your subjects.
That's exactly right.
Yeah.
And that does that tends to happen a lot because you develop a natural sympathy with sources over time.
I mean, it's an emotional relationship you have with people who are who educate you about something and are telling you about their world.
And for the most part, you know, usually they don't they're not going to burn you.
That's that's kind of part of the deal.
But that tends not to be as much the situation when you're dealing with national security people.
They have less compunction about about burning reporters than than other kinds of sources do, it seems like.
So, yeah, you're absolutely right.
Well, and it seems like there's supposed to be a rule, isn't there, that, hey, listen, I'm going to report what you say anonymously.
But if I find out that you're lying to me, I'm going to tell everybody your name and home address, dude.
You're not going to get away with hiding behind anonymity and make me the reporter look bad.
But that doesn't seem to be the rule, does it?
Well, different reporters think about that differently.
Like I, I would never burn a source under any circumstance, I don't think.
Even if you knew that he was just lying to you and using you in the worst kind of way?
Like, say this guy, Greg Gordon at McClatchy, who kept reporting over and over and over again about Cohen going to Prague, like in the Steele dossier.
Should he not burn the guys who told him to sell us that pile of garbage?
There should be something going on there.
There should be some kind of backlash.
And but the problem is how you behave towards sources impacts the way other people will behave towards you in the future.
So, you know, some whistleblower who's thinking about coming forward is going to look at all, you know, all the different reporters and say, which one, which one, you know, guarded my identity at all costs, no matter what.
And and so it's an it's an equation that you have to go through.
You know what it is?
When I was a cab driver, if somebody called both cab companies and we showed up at the same time, we'd both leave.
You don't get to do that and jerk us around.
You know what I mean?
So that should be the rule for all reporters that if you lie, we'll burn you.
But as long as you're not lying to us and using us to tell lies to other people, then you're totally fine.
Yeah.
I mean, I there there's there probably should be something kind of like a bad trick list.
You know what I mean?
Like, yeah, something like that, where reporters kind of tell each other, you know, who who to avoid and who not to avoid.
But but, yeah, certainly there's got to be some.
There's something I talked about that that so many reporters got beat on this story, you know, and they were sold stuff that turned out not to be true.
You know, not just down the road, but in some cases like immediately.
And they should have been mad about it.
And they weren't.
They weren't.
Which I don't understand.
Right.
Yeah.
Never mind.
Burn your sources.
At least be upset if they use you and lie to you.
Exactly.
Hey, guys, check out this cool near future dystopia.
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And this is a great story of.
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OK, now.
So the book Hate Inc.
It's serialized at substack dot com.
And that's a subscription thing.
But you have the last two chapters.
You've gone ahead and published open access for everyone.
Is that correct?
Yeah, that's right.
OK, so that's the Scarlet Letter Club and Russia Gay.
It's official.
Russiagate is this generation's WMD.
And both of those are really great and worth the read.
If anybody goes, it's just tiebe dot substack dot com.
Mm hmm.
Yep.
And and it's going to come out as a physical book, too.
OK.
And then.
So really, you're taking the role here of the inspector general of the American media establishment.
I mean, when you say you are one of the few inside the liberal media universe that got this right, you're excluding, obviously, maybe hundreds of alternative media people of all descriptions who got this right from the very beginning.
But you're talking about all of you real like fancy pants types up there on the inside of the group that, you know, the rest of us losers aren't a part of.
And that was where the real filter bubble kicked in.
And that's who you're holding to account here.
Yeah, definitely.
And look, you're absolutely right.
The alternative media was way ahead of the, you know, the quote unquote, you know, mainstream commercial media from the start on this thing.
And there the group think that started to set in in the business didn't didn't penetrate most of the most of the alternative media sources that were, you know, there were significantly better than we were when I when I'm when I'm writing about with all this stuff is is the big business.
Right.
Because that's that's a kind of a separate animal from the alternative media world, which I also came from.
You know, I grew up doing all weeklies and I self-published and did all that stuff.
But like you say in the book, too, you're the son of an NBC guy and you, you know, Rolling Stone is nothing to sneeze at it.
It may not be The Wall Street Journal or anything like that, but we all know you.
I mean, you're you are a big shot in American media.
And so you write this whole book from the point of view of the way you put it.
We this and we that.
Right.
This is you are self-identified part of this media establishment that you're holding to account.
Yeah, no.
And some of that is kind of a rhetorical technique, too.
I mean, I want to take some responsibility for for things that we got wrong, you know, because I'm in the business.
I have the opportunity to talk to a lot of a lot of colleagues.
And there were things that sometimes, you know, I I saw and maybe didn't say something early enough.
And, you know, some of this is on me, too.
And I made a lot of mistakes that I talk about in the book, particularly about, you know, sort of divisive, divisive media techniques, things that are designed to sort of make money and get clicks.
I did a lot of that stuff.
And so that's part of that is sort of a confessional talking about, you know, the financial pressures that are behind that kind of work.
Right.
Well, so we're going to get a little bit more into that in a minute.
But let's start here with Noam Chomsky and Manufacturing Consent.
That's the introduction.
And then you also have a great interview of Chomsky to begin the book there.
Yeah.
Originally, I was going to try to do something that was like a sequel to Manufacturing Consent, which was this great work of media criticism from the late 80s by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, who was a professor at Wharton.
Neither of them were media people, but they had done a series of studies of what they called the political economy of the United States.
A lot of it looked at sort of the histories of our involvement in Cambodia and into China and Vietnam.
And they ended up doing a big book that was sort of about how we have this informal system of censorship in the United States, where at the highest levels of the media, debate is really restricted between two relatively narrow poles of opinion.
You know, there's there's sort of a milquetoast sort of hawkish democratic line on one side.
And then there's the sort of loony right wing take on the other side.
And you can see this represented in your in your daily newspaper where you will see a Bret Stephens and Nick Kristoff, but nothing else.
You know, I mean, that's that's what you see in Brooks and Shields.
That's my favorite on public television news there.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
And so the whole idea is as long as you keep everything between those two poles, you know, it's you're basically fine.
And it looks to the average consumer like there's this vigorous debate going on.
But really what you're seeing is this kind of like ritualized, artificially narrowed thing.
And, you know, even people in the business aren't you know, weren't necessarily conscious of it.
And, you know, I had as you said, I grew up in the media.
My father was a reporter.
And when I when I first read that book when I was in my late teens, I was really surprised by it.
So I wanted to kind of redo that and see if the what his observations from the late 80s still held up in the Internet age.
And that was the original idea behind this book.
It turned into something else a little bit later on.
But, you know, I interviewed Chomsky about it and he was he was cool.
And we talked a lot about the state of modern media.
And and that's in the book, too, which is pretty interesting.
I actually got a chuckle out of the part where you guys say, hey, did you know that the capitalists used to be the radicals and they were the ones for freedom?
Isn't that crazy?
And you're shaking your head at each other, which I'm a libertarian.
So to me, that's just funny to see.
And I feel you.
Believe me.
Listen, so now here's the thing about it.
Right.
So we grew up on Rather, Jennings and Brokaw.
That's it.
I remember even when I was a kid thinking, oh, I get it.
Right.
So if Rather really screws up, Brokaw will nail him on it the next night.
Right.
And then I remember seeing how that's not actually the way it works.
They all just sort of keep on going ahead.
And even when they disagree with each other, they don't ever seem to really fight it out.
And then, of course, anyone who starts reading the news at whatever, any age is going to notice.
Wow, how much deeper stuff you can get, even in a short written story compared to what they tell you on TV.
But then that starts changing, really, with the rise of the blogs and the Internet and Iraq War II.
And I remember driving a cab and telling a guy in my cab, we're getting along.
He's a great guy.
And I'm going, yeah, me, I'm with antiwar.com and those guys.
And he's like, oh, not me.
I'm with Glenn Reynolds and little green footballs.
So this is the beginning of what you were talking about, of these silos where now, actually, it's not Rather Jennings and Brokaw anymore.
Those guys are all dying off and gone.
And now it's everybody has their own famous, their own favorite website where they read exactly what they like, their own Twitter feed that they curate with all people that they agree with.
And then, yeah, I don't know how many there are hundreds of these things where people pay attention essentially only to their own filter bubble and quite deliberately.
Yeah, no, exactly.
And the process really starts with with cable TV, because, you know, as you say, originally you had broadcast television.
So you're you're looking at at most in any market, a few channels.
You know, there might be the PBS channel and then there was one of there were the three networks and that was pretty much it for decades.
And the commercial strategy there was different because when you only have a few competitors, the game is let's try to get everybody.
Let's try to get the whole audience.
And, you know, we have to beat a couple of other people, but we're going to offer essentially the same product as they are.
We're going to try to just do it a little bit better.
When cable came along, suddenly there's this new idea.
Right.
You can put out a channel.
You can put out the Food Network.
Right.
And I remember I remember when the Food Channel came out, I think their first slogan was because everybody eats.
Right.
So they they're looking for people who are interested in food.
Right.
As opposed to reading the news.
And and so they're going to get a tiny slice of advertising and but they're going to keep it.
They're going to dominate it.
Soon, the news network started to pick up on this, that they could do the same thing with the with the sort of political landscape.
And Fox was really the first company.
And, you know, forget about what you think about Fox or what I think about Fox.
It's the strategy that's interesting.
The strategy was we're going to we're going to take a bunch of people who think one way and we're going to we're going to tailor the news to what they what they like and what they think.
And we're going to dominate that news market.
And that's going to make us more of a financial power than NBC and CBS and ABC, who are all going to be taking share from each other.
And this fragmentation of the landscape advances to the point where you're talking about, where it's not, you know, three or four big chunks of the news electorate.
It's it's like a hundred.
Right.
And and that it gets even smaller once you get to to websites as opposed to, you know, cable cable channels.
So it should be that we're all now check and balancing each other.
And it's great because now someone is calling out NBC News when they get it wrong and this kind of thing.
And yet we're not really correcting each other.
Right.
We're just pointing out the others to our own group.
No, exactly.
That's that's the problem.
And that that what you're describing has gotten significantly worse in the last just couple of years, even the sort of calling out that goes on the correcting your the original audience doesn't see the correction, because if you're if you're reporting on CNN or MSNBC, you get something wrong.
It appears in the Washington Examiner or the Daily Caller, you know, in some or someplace like that, or the Jimmy Dore show or your show.
And the MSNBC audience isn't going to see it.
So essentially the sort of bubble experience that everybody wants when they're consuming media, it's now uninterrupted.
And that's that's a really serious problem, because confronting your audience and making them face, you know, their misconceptions is a crucial part of what news reporting is all about.
Well, and we see some examples, too, where for the left and the right and the center and everybody where people get caught up in entire worlds of fantasy.
I mean, think about the idea just back a few years ago.
In fact, the guy in my Reddit group was talking about how people in his family back in like 2010, 2011, were just completely caught up in the idea that Sharia law was conquering all of America and that who's ever going to save us.
And, you know, their own idea that their own ability to do the math that like non-Muslims in America, like one or two percent, and they have no political power whatsoever.
And there are 50 state governments they'd have to seize and all these armories.
And yeah, no, it couldn't possibly be right.
But to them, they're terrified.
And it's because they're just not exposed to any other thing.
Or look at this completely ridiculous from the very beginning idea that Trump and the Russians worked together to rig the election of 2016.
It's completely ridiculous.
They might as well be chemtrail theorists.
You know, look at that contrail.
That one is suspicious to me.
Disprove that it's not made out of poison.
Yeah, no, you're absolutely right.
And when you don't have somebody calling you out or when you're when your audience isn't seeing that, there's no check on on the absurdity.
Right.
So, you know, the idea that that somebody offered little Carter Page, you know, essentially a 700 million dollar bribe.
Right.
The 19 percent ownership stake in a Russian government controlled oil company.
Right.
Yeah.
Which has a 63 billion dollar market capitalization.
You know, Adam Schiff read out that fact, that part of the Steele report on the floor of the house.
And, you know, reporters were reporting that stuff all over the place.
And I was sort of looking around in all directions and saying, are we going to check that, you know, before it goes out?
Because that doesn't sound that sounds a little bit outlandish to me, you know.
And the problem is that, yeah, I mean, like a factoid like that is is absolutely as absurd as a chemtrail.
And and but you can when your audience is in a certain place emotionally and they don't regularly have to ask the question.
Am I have I gone too far?
Is this information reliable?
Then that's when you can feed them almost anything and they'll buy it.
And it's Tom Woods.
It ain't nobody.
It's this is the best that you could get.
This is exactly what you would want out of such a thing.
If it existed, it does.
Tom Woods, Liberty Classroom.
What you do is you go to my website, Scott Horton dot org, and click through from the ad on the right hand side of the page there for Tom Woods, Liberty Classroom.
Well, and so talk about these the 10 rules of, hey, you have to go through every one of them.
But this is a business model essentially for cable TV news is mostly what you're describing here, right?
Basically, yeah.
I mean, the essence of it is the easiest way to make the money is to is to give people bad news about another demographic.
So if you if you click on MSNBC, 99 percent of what you're going to see is about how the Republicans are doing something that's going to make the world worse.
And it's going to be a whole just sort of endless feed of information about the inequity of the Republican Party.
And you'll notice that they won't they won't even address other ideologies, other ideas.
They won't talk about non-voters.
They won't talk about libertarians.
They won't talk about it.
Yeah, it's always about the Republicans.
And if you go to Fox, it's exactly the opposite model.
And this is this is sort of a business model that they found that works.
First of all, you have to artificially narrow the landscape for people so that they think there's only two ideas in the world.
Then you tell them that the other idea is responsible for everything that's bad in the universe.
You keep them away from any topic that has to do with bipartisan cooperation.
So you stay away from things like the continually escalating military budget.
You can stay away from foreign occupations, from drone assassination, because those are things that both parties have have a hand in central banking corruption.
And, you know, you make sure that everybody gets this binary representation of politics and you just keep hammering it over and over again.
And that's how you make the money.
And everybody knows it in the business.
It's just it's a it's a difficult cycle to break.
Yeah.
Well, so what would George Carlin say?
He would say this is all a ruse by the powerful to make all us regular people hate each other so that we don't hate them.
Of course, it's you know, this is an age old technique that goes back to God.
God knows when.
Right.
I mean, you think about you think about the late 1700s, early 1800s, you know, the plantation owner puts pits the poor white farmers against the poor black farmers.
That's sort of the roots of modern racism and, you know, bad really race relations.
The whole idea behind that was to keep everybody from grabbing pitchforks and going after the, you know, the master.
Right.
And this is this is a simplified version of what goes on today, where if you were really trying to describe the demographics of of politics, not just in the United States, but everywhere, you'd be talking about, you know, a tiny segment of the population.
You know, one to two percent of the country that has most of the wealth and gets most of the new income.
And then there's a huge sort of pile of everybody else that is artificially divided into a couple of camps that mostly argue over social issues that don't have to do with the sort of day to day.
And so you're absolutely right.
I think this is at its heart.
It's both a way to make money, but it's also propaganda technique as well.
When you talk about in here where it's also the total reductum ad absurdum.
So they're not just the conservatives.
They're the Nazis and they're not just the liberals.
They're the communists.
And everybody's Hitler and everybody's supposed to absolutely hate and be terrified of each other.
Right.
Yeah, because it's like a drug.
Like, you know, you have a law of diminishing returns when you're selling essentially an addictive product to people, because this is what it is.
You're you're getting people hooked on the idea that they're going to turn on the channel and they're going to find out something bad about somebody else that's going to make them feel better about themselves.
So that only works for so long.
You have to keep ratcheting up the rhetoric so that the people that you're hearing about are continually worse.
And before long, you know, everybody else on the other side is Hitler or Stalin.
Like, it was it was hilarious sort of watching Glenn Beck try to hold on to his audience share over the years because he he had to invoke Hitler and Stalin at the same time to to keep his viewership.
And now now the same thing is going on with MSNBC, with CNN.
And and what happens when you do that is that people turn their brains off.
And because once once you once the enemy is Hitler, then there's no longer any thought of discussing things rationally with them.
And this was this was what was so dangerous about the whole deplorable comment.
It was it was basically an invitation to say, you don't have to listen to anything that, you know, other people say, you know, who are not Democrats, because they are bad people.
They are, you know, racist and white supremacists.
Like the facility with which people use that term now is just unbelievable to me.
I mean, there's no attempt to be just to try to discern, you know, different types of political movements on the other side.
So yeah, that's very dangerous, too.
Yeah, I like what Bill Burr said about after the election, even before they really were running full speed with the Russia stuff, they were trying very hard to push first, just all fake news from wherever it was Russia or not.
And then also racist.
They're the racist.
And Bill Burr said, oh, yeah.
So the racist, there's this mass of Americans just live out in the woods somewhere.
And then they sat out the election of 2008 and 2012 when the black guy won twice.
But then when Hillary Clinton, the whitest lady in America ran, that's when they all came out of the woods just to make sure to stop her in the name of race.
It must have been what it was.
And what's amazing about that is that I, you know, I covered the Obama campaign and Obama and he talked about this after Trump won.
Obama did an interesting thing.
And, you know, I have mixed feelings about Obama.
But as a campaigner, he went into a lot of places where he knew he was not going to get 50 percent of the vote.
He went into a lot of towns where he knew he was unpopular.
And and his aim was to try to boost his numbers from 15 to 22 or, you know, from 20 to 28 or whatever it was.
And the idea was like, look, I'm going to I respect the idea that, you know, you have different opinions and I respect you enough that I'm going to try to convince you to come around to my point of view on things.
And I want you to be exposed to me as a politician and give you a chance to show that you can make an educated decision.
And that's exactly what the Democrats didn't do this time.
They had a completely different strategy, which was based on the idea that we're not going to waste resources campaigning in places where we're going to lose.
And so they forfeited huge portions of the country.
And voters were annoyed by that.
Of course they were.
You know, Aramonte actually points out in that book Shattered where they said the more exposure you have in these Midwestern states, the worse your numbers get.
So it wasn't that she was too lazy and dumb to make the decision to go to Wisconsin and campaign.
It's that her people told her that'll make matters worse.
But then what does she do, though?
She went to Arizona and to Texas and she said, geez, with Robert Kagan's endorsement, maybe I can get Republicans who don't like Trump to vote for me and maybe the Democrats will take Texas, which was.
Yeah, OK, that's sure, because that's all Republicans who hate Hillary Clinton more than anything else or anyone else in the world.
That's all they need to hear is that Robert Kagan says she's cool.
She's willing to go to more war.
And that's what makes a moderate.
Right.
That's what makes a centrist and get that swing vote.
I mean, what does that tell you about the thinking of people like that, though?
I mean, it's it's so hard to explain.
But the way that people who have been living in D.C. too long think about politics, they think it's all transactional and that all you have to do is make deals with people within the within the circle to to to get the votes out there.
So their idea of how you win Republican votes is to is to sign up for Robert Kagan.
You see what I'm saying?
Yeah, it's it's not to go out and talk to people and find out what they're really upset about or and find out what they don't like about you or, you know, any of those things like, you know, to to to to give Bill Clinton some credit.
And I am not a fan of Bill Clinton, but I watched you know, I watched him a little bit in 2000 when he campaigned for Gore.
He just has a facility for going going into places and talking to people and asking them, you know, what's your job like?
You know, you you work in a coffee shop.
What's that like?
And politicians have gotten out of the habit of doing that.
They think everything is transactional, that if they get the endorsement of this newspaper or that person, that that's going to translate into votes.
And it doesn't work like that.
You just you just can't.
You can't do things like that.
I'm sorry, I got too many too many ways to go down the Hillary campaign angle here.
But I want to get back to everybody's Hitler and all that as you write about.
I forget if you write about this part in the book about how none of this is true, right?
Like all this exists on Twitter and all of this exists on TV news.
But if you go to Chuck E. Cheese, everybody's cool.
And if you go to work in the morning, and, you know, interact with people, I guess, unless you live in the very smallest town somewhere or something, but essentially anybody goes outside lives a different reality than this entire frame of mind here.
It's Yeah, I do write about that.
And that's, that's exactly, it's exactly right.
It's, you know, if you have kids, you go to a birthday party, right?
It's like, this is the new thing in America right now, everybody has to go to a gigantic birthday party every weekend.
And, and all the parents are trying to outdo each other with how much they spend on the birthday parties.
But you meet, you know, you meet other parents, and you and you talk and everybody gets along, you know what I mean?
Like the the initial instinct for most people is to be decent and generous and to and to give the other person's point of view, at least a hearing, you know, and and if we disagree, we tend to find a way to to move on and move past that disagreement, work together and do all these things.
This is the opposite of the reality that we show you on on TV, where what we're, we're constantly saying is that these these two points of view are irreconcilable, that there's no way that that you can ever have an accommodation between these two people.
And it was the this is the conceit of like the original Crossfire show, which was no matter how long we debate, no matter how long we talk things out, we can never agree, we're always fighting.
And when you turn on the show tomorrow, we'll be fighting again.
And that's, it's, it's not real.
It's not the way human beings really interact.
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Now, so here's the thing, man, there was a period of time, I think it must have been in fifth and sixth grade, it was right when the Undertaker was new.
And it was Hulk Hogan.
And I guess it was the very end of the Andre the Giant era.
But the ultimate warrior and all that.
So there's about two years there where I really like it was WWF then, but you really know about this stuff.
And you write about in this book about how well Trump understood the world of wrestling.
Of course, he was part of it there for a little bit.
A little while, but he must have taken a class on how these characters work, where because, or is it really just in your analysis, you really think he was deliberately playing the heel, the character in a wrestling match here?
He was, and I didn't, you know, I wasn't like a wrestling fan.
So I didn't, I didn't catch it that early.
But I remember talking to, um, to a guy in, it was actually in New Hampshire.
And he was saying, like, Look, if you want to understand Trump, you know, just just watch the WWE.
And, and, and later on, there was a book that I read by, I think his name is Steve Bischoff.
He was a, you know, he was a former heel act himself.
It was called controversy creates cash.
And the whole idea was, it was all about how, how the dramatics and the theatrics of wrestling works.
And the whole concept is, um, you know, you have, you make a simplified sort of morality play where there's a good guy and a bad guy, and everything depends upon the bad guy.
If you don't have a good bad guy, the show doesn't work.
And Trump was an amazing heel act.
He just, he hooked us all.
He drove ratings through the roof, which is exactly the way the WWE works.
And eventually, what happens with with with wrestling is that people start to kind of, they kind of start to like the heel after a while, like, and that's why you see the, you know, the heel turn every now and then, right?
He turns, he turns face, there's two characters, there's the heel and the baby face.
And every now and then you'll get you'll get a, you know, a bad guy who turns into a good guy.
And look, Trump, Trump used all these dynamics to, to drive publicity for himself to get press coverage.
And it was straight out of straight out of the WWE playbook.
And it was amazing that nobody in the press caught on to it.
Well, but here's the thing, though, right, is that, as you put it in the book, he never did turn face and become the good guy.
He won as the villain.
So how's that?
Yeah, I mean, that is not easy to understand.
I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that the I don't think he was running against Hillary Clinton.
Sorry.
Yeah, exactly.
No, I mean, that's, that's what it comes down to.
She was a heel, too.
She just wasn't any good at it.
She was like scary, sherry.
Yeah, exactly.
She she somehow pinned herself in the contest.
And Trump, Trump, I'm certain he did not want he did not want to win.
He did not expect to win.
He was doing this as a publicity stunt.
And, you know, watching him on the trail, it was it was pretty clear that he was sort of sniffing out the crowd and feeling what they were upset about and sort of feeding them red meat.
Every sure he didn't really want to win.
I mean, I've heard people say that.
But and I kind of thought he sure wasn't trying hard enough with all the openings he had all summer.
He could have nuked her out of the water and won in a landslide.
But I don't know if he was pulling his punches or he was just too ignorant to know her weaknesses were, you know.
Well, he he focused a lot early on on the other Republicans.
And I did get the sense that he was he was kind of underwhelmed by the caliber of the opposition and the Republican field.
Yeah, because he couldn't find somebody who was even worth fixating on, you know, the, you know, Jeb Bush was a complete pushover.
He was he was destroyed really in their first interaction, which was that whole sort of blow up over Bush's wife.
And Trump insults Jeb's Mexican wife and then then his mother.
And he says he wants his mommy.
And Jeb says, my mother is the strongest person in the world.
And Trump says she should be running.
And that was it.
He was dead from that moment.
Right.
And there was no.
And Bush got three delegates for 150 million dollars.
And so, but I thought the whole thing, it felt and most of us who are following him got the sense that he was he was not taking it seriously.
He was winging it.
He was having fun.
That was that was another thing like no, no presidential candidate enjoys running.
And he was early.
And I thought you can only feel that way if you don't really care how the what the eventuality is in the end.
I mean, it was he was, I thought, trying to do maybe a media network or something at the end of the rainbow.
But but what he didn't know was that, you know, Hillary Clinton was so unpopular in the political establishment was so unpopular that he won.
It was amazing.
Well, I mean, a lot of people saw it coming.
I'll give credit to Scott Adams, the Dilbert cartoon guy, because I saw him on TV.
It would have been in the fall of 2015.
I'm pretty sure.
And he just said, oh, Trump is far more persuasive than any of these other people.
He's first forecasting a wide net.
He didn't call himself a conservative.
He calls himself an American.
He's just running for president as himself, essentially.
But he's not trying to isolate some small group to pander to.
He's going for the broad net.
And then he has these insults.
I forgot what Scott Adams called them.
I forgot he had this certain name for them, but just these perfect insults that like Jeb Bush being low energy.
It's it's not just a little Marco and all that.
Yeah, it's great because it's first of all, it's true.
Right.
But also it's unique.
No one ever called anybody low energy specifically in that way before.
Right.
It almost even sounds clumsy, low energy or something.
But man, you cannot help but think that every time you see Jeb.
And if he acts high energy, then you go, oh, yeah, you're trying to make up for how low energy you are.
And it's just man, it's like a hole in the side of your bow.
You're just done.
And same thing with little Marco.
Yeah, he's little.
He can't grow whiskers on his chin.
He looks like an idiot up there.
He looks like he's out of his league.
And and the same with the rest of them.
You know, so there I forgot what Scott Adams called them, but he was he was just saying how Trump is the master of this.
And then look at who he's up against.
You just go down the list.
A bunch of Rand and Rubio's.
They don't stand a chance against this guy.
And Hillary Clinton, she couldn't have even beat Jeb.
And Jeb would have stomped her into the ground.
I was predicting a Jeb victory for years because I knew there's no Democrat to face down Hillary.
She's got a lock on the nomination and therefore the Republicans going to win.
So it's going to be Jeb.
That was what I thought until Scott Adams convinced me that, no, it's going to be Trump for the Republicans.
But then I knew he'd be the president from that point on a year before.
So how anybody else missed that?
It was huge, you know?
Yeah.
I mean, look, I publicly bet on Trump to win the nomination pretty early, like in the summer of 2015.
I went when he when he won New Hampshire, I was actually feeling like he had a really good chance at the at the general.
And then I made a huge mistake later listening to a pollster basically tell me I got sat down at the Republican National Convention and had some Democratic pollster lay out for me how it was demographically impossible for Trump to win.
And I bought it.
It was a huge mistake that I made.
And I should have listened to my eyes and ears because just by going by the crowds and how people were reacting, Hillary was really struggling to fill small halls.
And she had she just didn't have themes that were that were working, you know, like the stuff that she was running with was it was all it was almost entirely about Trump.
And Trump would point that out, too.
He's like, you know, she doesn't have anything to say that doesn't have anything to do with me.
And, you know, voters pick up on that stuff.
And and in this modern style of campaigning, she was just terrible.
She was she she she had no sense that what she thought of as her strengths, which were, you know, being in Washington for 25 years or whatever it was, were considered weaknesses by today's electorate.
And she just kept running with it.
She just was walking into the propeller over and over again.
It was it was amazing to watch.
Well, that was part of the attack on America was they leaked emails where they talked about how, well, you know what, since we've tried so hard struggling to come up with a theme for her campaign, what if we went ahead and latched on to that and use that and just said, it's her turn?
She deserves it.
We owe it to her to make her the president now.
And that because that was actually their best idea because they were out of ideas that I couldn't make that up.
Right.
That was what that was the accusation.
But that was what they thought on the inside of the campaign.
Maybe we'll just do that.
It's her turn.
You owe her this.
That was in the book Shattered.
Oh, it was in Shattered.
OK, I'm sorry.
I was thinking that was in the WikiLeaks.
I'm sorry.
Thank you for helping.
No, no, no.
It was that was one of the major revelations is that they they couldn't come up with with a slogan.
And it was worse than that because they were having internal discussions.
We need to talk about the whole question of why is she running?
What does she want to what does she want to accomplish?
Like, what's what's the idea behind her candidacy?
And it wasn't like, let's raise the standard of living for working people.
It was they couldn't come up with one.
So they eventually just sort of punted.
And they were they were genuinely talking about, you know, bumper stickers that would have said it's her turn, which is the real reason, you know.
And and that just shows you the sort of ragged poverty of of what the thinking was on that side.
And it was it was incredible that they that they don't realize how how toxic that was.
Well, and you know what?
It goes to the whole thing about the media consensus, too.
Here's this lady that got stomped into the ground by a black guy named Barack Hussein Obama in 2008.
She's the reason everybody hated Bill Clinton for eight years.
It wasn't because of affable old Bill who likes to ask people what their job is like and stuff like that.
It was because of his wife.
Have you ever seen the Norm Macdonald clips from Saturday Night Live about there's like 100 clips about Hillary Clinton.
She was such a laughingstock.
This whole time and a hate figure, really, especially since she had power, you know, like real power of her own.
And so you can understand how the very thoughtless conventional wisdom would be that, well, you can't run a quirky, bald old Jew from Vermont or from from Brooklyn to be the president United States, can you?
But yeah, but you can't elect a black guy named Barack Hussein Obama either, can you?
You can when he's running against Hillary Clinton.
You can't elect a game show host either, but you can if he's running against Hillary Clinton.
She never had to face anybody but Rick Lazio and whoever nobody's in the you know, she was anointed for her Senate seat.
She never had to win a real election before.
She never did win one.
And so how could they not have seen that?
Bernie Sanders had these huge crowds like Obama.
He was bringing people in and that actually a quirky, bald old Jew from Brooklyn who speaks obviously very much from the heart right now in a way that people aren't used to hearing that kind of character is perfect.
He would have beat Trump by 20 points probably.
And I say that as not a Sanders fan at all, that he would have had such advantage that she did not have just in terms of charisma alone, you know?
Well, if you when you talk to voters that year and still, you know, the thing that they were most tired of was like the phony come on of Washington politicians, the poll tested language, the the the mechanical formulations of policies that were clearly, you know, designed by a bunch of K Street lobbyists like they they had picked up on the fact that that stuff was fake, that the speeches were fake, that the policy ideas were not.
Designed to actually deliver any real results.
And so they were looking for somebody who was genuine.
And Trump, who has a let's just say an extremely complicated relationship with the truth is his personality at least comes through quite a lot on this stuff.
Like George Carlin said about Bill Clinton.
Well, he's full of it, but at least he's honest.
Exactly.
That's exactly right.
That's exactly right.
And and and it was the same thing with Sanders had the same thing.
And I got this from people in Republican crowds.
They would you know, they would say, you know, I don't like that he's a socialist, but, you know, I think he's real.
Right.
And being real suddenly started to matter in 2016.
And and the problem that Hillary Clinton had was that she didn't even know what real was that they couldn't work their way back to figuring out who they were.
Literally.
And back to your book.
None of their friends on TV were given the many hard truths about this.
They were all so invested in the narrative themselves that they, of course, you know, served a counterproductive interest for their friend.
In fact, I forget to mention in the book about the Pied Piper strategy where the Democrats at least said they were going to ask all their liberal media friends to promote Trump because he or Carson or Cruz, the three of them, because they're the wingers.
And so they'll be the easiest to beat in the fall.
I don't know if I even got to the Pied Piper thing, but you're definitely hitting on something that I talk about in the book, which is that the in the plane, there's a dynamic that's that's really bad where the reporters, you know, they see candidates as their meal tickets.
You know, if you if you've been on a campaign plane, what happens at the outset of campaigns is that people within the newspapers and the big TV stations will jockey for the right to be the person who covers X, Y or Z candidate, because what they're thinking is when that candidate becomes the president, then I'm going to be the go to person.
I'm going to be the next Bob Woodward who gets to write Bush at war.
You know what I'm saying?
Like they they they they link their professional fortunes to the to the candidate.
So you get all these people who are on the plane and you can see this with the the what's that video that Hillary did with the with the mannequin thing at the end where they you know, everybody on the plane sort of freezes and they do this.
They do this ridiculous video, everybody pretends to be a mannequin on the plane.
It was right before the election.
I had missed that, but that sounds like something she would have thought would have been a great idea.
Yeah.
And it had we had like Jon Bon Jovi was on the plane and and and and Bill Clinton and her and all the reporters and they all participated.
And the thing is that they all nobody's going to go to Hillary Clinton to her face and tell her, hey, you know, you're just not working out there.
That's like, you know, what's the deal?
Do you have an actual strategy like that?
You're not going to get that kind of question because you want to be the favorite.
And that's that's a really bad situation.
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All right.
Now, Halperin, the gang of 500.
And I like this because it sounds like the committee of 300, you know, the skull and bones Illuminati kill committee.
But it's not.
It's the most shallow, ridiculous categorization of, I guess, influential people in New York and D.C. by Mark Halperin.
So who's he?
So he was like the unofficial bard of campaign journalism for a while until he got sunk by a MeToo scandal, I guess, a couple of years ago.
But he wrote that book Game Change.
You probably saw he co-wrote it with John Heilman, the book about Sarah Palin and, you know, the sort of internal dynamics of the choice of her as the running mate in 2008.
And for a long time, he was he was sort of the big hot shot on the plane.
And the idea was whoever Halperin picked as the likely candidate was the person you had to watch out for, because, as Halperin himself said, he had his finger on the pulse of what he called the gang of 500, which were the the 500 people in D.C. and New York, I guess, who really mattered, who chose the candidates and decided who got to be president.
And there's so many things wrong with with that formulation, you know, beginning with the idea that every reporter has 500 people in their Rolodex.
So, like, you know, I'm not going to call my role, you know, like my sources aren't the gang of 500.
They're just my sources.
Right.
But he this idea that this little mini oligarchy of people got to decide elections for the rest of the country.
He was so clueless that that that didn't sound so good to people who would actually read it, that he bragged about it.
And this was a thing like reporters actually believed this idea that the invisible primary was what decided elections.
And, you know, and in that sense, when Trump got elected, I you know, part of me was like, you know, it's I'm almost glad because it's a slap in the face of people who thought that they get to decide everything.
And and maybe they won't think that way going forward.
Yeah, well, it is a miracle of Madison's constitutional system that the way it works is that the you know, you can have a Clinton Bush centrist, neoliberal, neocon consensus there for however long, but eventually the American people can elect someone to put a stop to it.
In fact, I mean, really, just having Obama elected not just as the opposite party, but as an explicit repudiation of Bush, and then to have the Republicans elect a president who ran against, which obviously for utilitarian reasons, his brother was in the race, but also just in general for broad support.
As you write about the audience liked it, when his right wing Republican audience liked it when he attacked George Bush and ran against that legacy of the Republican Party, the same legacy that sunk Mitt Romney and John McCain in 08 and 12 and 08, you know, he ran against that.
So you kind of got to hand it to, I mean, it is Donald Trump.
Don't get me wrong.
I'm not saying he's doing anything right about it, but he ran against that legacy and won in America's, you know, little d democratic or little r Republican system that we have here.
And that alone is actually kind of special.
Like I said, I thought it was just hands down.
It's going to be Jeff.
They're going to make us choose between Bill Clinton's wife or George Bush's brother.
Well, I guess George Bush's brother's going to win because nobody's going to vote for Hillary.
But I mean, what a tragedy that was.
In fact, that was the obvious opening, right?
Was the Democrats went along with it, but the Republicans took the opportunity to say, we don't have to go along with that.
Why in the world?
What is this?
You know, Duke, Jeb and Duchess Hillary, and they're like in line somehow for the throne around here.
Yeah, no, they really thought it's their turn, right?
You know, that's the way they think.
And it's wrong.
And a few times after Trump got elected, because we saw all these things in the newspaper, all the pundits were suddenly saying, Oh, my God, democracy is under attack, right?
We've seen that democracy is in crisis, or maybe there's too much democracy.
Actually, I mean, the Trump election, and this has nothing to do with what you think of Donald Trump or what you think of his policies or what you think of the people who support him.
But what it proved is that the traditional barriers to entry for power in this country, which had to do with corporate donors, the media, the two sort of entrenched political parties, that they can be usurped legally at the ballot.
And from my point of view, it was unfortunate that Donald Trump was the person who provided that example.
But to me, that showed that democracy actually does work, right?
And that voters still do have a say in the situation, which I was beginning to doubt.
And so it's, I think that things got more interesting when Trump got elected.
I, you know, I'm not a fan of his, by any stretch of the imagination, but I thought I thought it reintroduced something to the process.
You know, I really wonder if Ron Paul had just been 1% of the horrible, mean, right-wing nationalist racist that the liberals portrayed him as at the time back then, if only he had just been 1% of that and willing to demagogue against the media and say, look at how unfair the media is, look at how much they hate me, look at how much they hate you, that they won't even tell you the truth about me.
Just the same way that Donald Trump did, it would have been legit.
He would have been expressing the frustration of the people.
And, you know, Jon Stewart famously said, what is Ron Paul, a 13th floor of a hotel or something?
You can't even mention his name at all.
He's blacklisted, banned from the airways, you know, the way they outright stole Iowa from, and all on the theory that he was Donald Trump.
He was the guy who's this reckless, right-wing populist, racist, you know, war criminal and waiting or whatever, when of course he's the exact opposite of that in every way.
He's an anti-demagogue.
But if only he'd just been one tiny little bit of a demagogue and picked on the media, I wonder whether he would have done eight years and ended the American empire and set us all free.
Well, I think it was actually worse than that, because having covered some of his, both of his runs, the reporters, their attitude towards Ron Paul wasn't so much that they disagreed with his policy, they just thought he was not serious.
They thought he was inevitably not going to be a factor, because, you know, people that we decide are not real candidates are not real candidates.
And so he was just habitually ignored.
It was a similar phenomenon with Dennis Kucinich on the other side.
Although Kucinich had less support, you know, they just decided to ignore him because of a whole lot of things that had nothing to do with the reality of his politics.
No, it was worse than that.
It was because of the wars.
They would list all 10 people running except him and this kind of thing.
You know what I mean?
That's true.
You're right.
We're reporting from Iowa straw poll here, and they interview every single buddy in every campaign.
There's Ron Paul people everywhere in the background, but refuse to even mention his name.
And in fact, the guy back at CNN headquarters going, don't, don't, don't, don't say Ron Paul.
Don't even talk about it.
Okay, we're going to break.
And this kind of thing.
It was a vendetta.
It's the same vendetta we see against Tulsi Gabbard right now.
How come you love Bashar al-Assad?
It's all they can come up with to try to trash this Iraq War II tour combat veteran.
I remember being in South Carolina.
I think it was in 08.
And, and Ron Paul supporters were so frustrated by their inability to get coverage that they started sort of trolling other candidates and let's events in the hope that they could sort of get in between the cameras.
So, you know, I would cover a Newt Gingrich event.
And, you know, Newt Gingrich wasn't going to win.
He was, and he was ridiculous.
But there were, you know, a dozen times more reporters at his events than there were at, at Ron Paul events.
And, you know, they would, they would be stuck on the outsides of the event and like little tents or groups of cars and the reporter reporters wouldn't go talk to them.
But that was what they were reduced to, to try to get coverage.
And it was frustrating.
And you know what?
I'm not that crazy.
I know that he wouldn't have been able to beat Barack Obama with the charisma that he was bringing and the surface identity as the exact opposite of George Bush, where Ron Paul was a old white Republican from Texas, exactly like Bush, almost looks like him kind of thing.
And the fact that he was in reality, the exact opposite of him, that wouldn't have made the difference, you know, image versus substance there.
Obama would have won.
However, if Ron had been the nominee, then his entire campaign would have been this Obama guy better promise to get us out of Afghanistan.
And this kind of thing, the whole time attacking him from the left on the things that liberals are good on, like opposing empire and stuff like that, and would have got major concessions out of them, you know, and he was trying, you know, unlike Rand, where Rand could have also, it was all his fault, essentially, he had the media at his fingertips, but he refused to take on the system.
That was why he got nowhere.
But yeah, no, I think you're right.
I was a little puzzled by Rand's campaign.
He, you know, he was doing lots of gimmicks, you know, the shooting the tax code and everything.
And but just a tragedy.
He could have done a lot of the same things that that that that Trump was doing when Trina Trump was going into crowds, and he was, he was sensing that there were vets in the crowds who had some negative feelings about the war.
And he started talking about it more and more as time went on.
And he was saying, Oh, these are bad deals.
And what do we get out of it?
And, you know, and why, why, why isn't Germany paying more for NATO and all this kind of stuff?
And that could have been Rand Paul, you know, he could have he could have run with that critique a little bit better.
And same thing again, too.
He wouldn't have beaten Trump in the primary, but he would have been second to last instead of Ted Cruz.
And he could have made all of his arguments.
Okay, Trump, if you're going to be the nominee, you better promise to get us out of Afghanistan and right away to write again.
Lost opportunity, but for a different reason.
That one was all Rand's fault.
The first time it was when they did it to his old man, it was them doing it.
It was the media consensus.
And anyway, I don't want to get too far off onto that.
Because I do want to ask you one last thing, which is about this chapter that you have about the national security state here.
And our national security beat reporting, essentially.
And what's a four sourced clover.
So we have this like loophole problem with national security reporting, which is that let's say your reporter who covers Russia, right.
And let's take a story that came out in the New York Times a couple years ago.
As an example, there was a front page story that said all of our informants and our spies in Russia have gone dark.
So, and if you look at that story, you'll find that it usually has two or three unnamed sources.
And usually the designation is something like current and former officials say.
And the problem with this kind of information is that the source can be the best source in the world.
It can be the head of the CIA, for all you know, and in many cases it is.
But there's no way for reporters to independently confirm these stories.
Like, you're not going to be able to go to Russia and find out what happened to our informants there.
You're not going to be able to see the cables that suddenly stop.
So we have this loophole where we get told stuff by people in the government, and it's unverifiable.
And the sources themselves won't give us their names, or they won't use their names.
And so reporters, for some reason, continually keep putting their heads in the chopping block this way.
They'll do these stories that are sourced to a whole bunch of people.
And I call them four-source clovers because the trend lately is to have four sources for some reason.
And it's usually not four sources.
Usually it's one person who tells you to call three other people who will tell you the same thing.
But the story can fall apart really easily because you can't confirm it.
Like, if somebody tells you that the Trump campaign had repeated contacts with Russian intelligence, well, how do you confirm that?
Tell me exactly how I can confirm that.
And they can't.
They won't.
They'll say, oh, it's signals intelligence, and we can't tell you what that is.
So it's a loophole.
And it was a major reason why Russiagate developed the way it did, because a lot of these stories were in that vein.
What's funny is on some of that stuff, you can see why, man, we're going to have to report this somehow.
But you could report the exact same story in the frame of some sources want us to report this to you.
And that's the story, maybe.
Exactly.
And just frame it that way.
We're not saying that this is true.
We're not going, oh, well, we got four sources.
So what are you going to do?
We're saying there are some people who are coming to us, and they want us to make you believe that this is true.
It might be or it might not.
I guess we'll find out.
And then that would be perfectly legit.
It would be.
And this is an argument I've had with some reporters lately about some of the Russiagate stories.
So if you look back, one of the stories had to do with Michael Flynn.
And there were all these reports that there were concerns raised about Flynn's, the attention that he paid to a Russian born woman at Cambridge University at an event.
In February of 2014.
And what reporters were told was that there was a complaint made by somebody at the dinner to American intelligence, and they wouldn't tell us what date that complaint was made.
But the whole idea behind the story was to raise the question in the minds of people that maybe General Flynn had an affinity for Russians, or maybe he had been compromised.
Maybe he had a relationship with this woman.
That was implied.
I know for a fact that a lot of these reporters were told that Flynn had had an affair with this woman, even though that was never reported.
So, yeah, like, you can either report that, that, you know, as a senior intelligence official says that a complaint was made about General Flynn, or you can say, for some reason, they want us to report that.
And I think that would be just as legitimate an approach, you know, but again, if you're the kind of person who's going to do that, they're not going to call you.
That's the problem.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
But yeah, I mean, so much of this, and you know, I work for antiwar.com.
So a lot of times it's like, listen, this can be a headline, but you're gonna have to change warrants to claims, because we don't accept the premise that they really care about us behind any of these stories.
They say that something's a threat.
We're reporting that they're saying that we're not reporting that there's a danger there, you know?
Right, right, exactly.
Exactly.
And that, and this is...
Hell, and especially when they're pointing the finger at foreign governments, who's the world empire around here?
You know, just because we're from here doesn't make it the case that the Soviets won the Cold War, and we've been on the defensive ever since then, does it?
No, I mean, look, I lived in Russia when we openly meddled in their election.
You know, I lived in Moscow in 1996.
American advisors had an office in the Kremlin, you know?
We designed some of Yeltsin's campaign commercials, we did privatization programs, we designed them so that we could fundamentally reorder the Russian economy so that certain people could donate more to the Yeltsin campaign.
And Yeltsin went from 7% in the polls to winning, you know, in part because of our help.
You can look back at Time Magazine, July 15th, 1996, and you'll see a headline that says, Yanks to the Rescue, where we bragged about interfering in a foreign election.
They even made a movie about it.
It's on the Pirate Bay, I forget the name.
Yeah, it's Spinning Boris, it's called.
And it's got Jeff Goldblum in it, Anthony LaPaglia, I think, is in it.
But yeah, so look, yes, the question that you have to ask with the Russian interference thing, you don't have to deny that it happens.
We can talk about that, but we have to ask the question of how meaningful it was.
We have to ask the question of how common it is that other countries also try to influence our elections.
How much does foreign money end up in the campaign coffers of candidates?
Does it come from the United Arab Emirates as well, from Israel, from China?
You know, there's ample evidence that there's all kinds of interference that goes on from different actors all over the world.
But the tunnel vision that we got about Russia this time sort of implied that none of those other things were stories.
And again, that gets back to what you were saying just a minute ago, which is, why does somebody want us to think that the only thing in the world to worry about is Russia?
And that's a question that we got to ask.
Or why would we trust the CIA and the media establishments' consensus about what any foreign government is up to?
After all we've been through?
After all they claimed about Assad and Qaddafi and Saddam all this time?
You've got to be kidding that any of us would take this stuff for granted at all.
I mean, even with the Assange and Manning thing going on right now, Manning tried to give this stuff to the Post and the Times.
They wouldn't touch it.
I know.
I know.
And on the Assange topic, I've been incredibly frustrated because, well, for a variety of reasons, right?
Assange, back when he was seen as somebody who was dirtying up George W. Bush, suddenly he was the darling of every newspaper in America and in Britain and in Europe.
And then suddenly, after this news cycle, he's a foreign spy.
We don't need to really see the evidence for that.
We will just accept the pronouncements of the same intelligence services that have been trying to put him away for however many years.
And, you know, there's just a process whereby you kind of create an ick factor around certain characters and the press at that point won't examine things critically anymore.
And that's happened with Assange.
And that's an incredible point of frustration for me.
Yeah, it's funny.
I did quit Twitter, but I did a little bit of trolling, but not logged in.
But I looked around a little bit and I saw a lot of people kind of happy to sacrifice this guy, to throw him to the wolves.
It seems like really the exception are the very few journalists who are willing to say, hey, hey, hey, not so fast, guys.
Whereas the consensus itself is, yeah, go ahead and get him because we're still mad about him stealing the election from Hillary for the Kremlin or whatever it is.
And so, but leave me alone, you know, and sacrificing him like that.
It's really, it's its own news story, isn't it?
It's pretty huge.
Yeah, no, the inability of reporters to see past the character in the story to the precedent that's underneath, which is the real issue, right?
Like, I don't think the government really cares about Julian Assange all that much.
I mean, they clearly have a deep and abiding anger about a lot of things, but they don't see him as this unstoppable global threat.
I think what they're really worried about is future Assanges and the whole concept of leaks becoming sort of formalized and a legitimate part of the news landscape.
So this prosecution is directly targeted at anybody who does any kind of national security reporting, because if you look at the indictment, it describes conduct that's really pretty common, like reporter source interaction for a lot of the indictment.
And you would think that reporters would be like wigged out by that a little bit, you know, and they're not.
And not only that, that tells you that they just never imagined themselves in the position of being in opposition to the government about stuff.
Right.
Yeah, it's funny that the position that these journalists essentially are saying is, I had no right to know those things.
And I still really resent you for leaking this information for me to report on.
You know, we could have had another Summer of the Shark or Gary Condon or some garbage and instead you made us do journalism about, you know, the corruption of Donna Shalala or whoever.
Right.
Or Guantanamo Bay or, you know, the Afghan war logs or, you know, I mean, look, Wikileaks has done, you know, they've done some things that I wouldn't do.
Right.
Like I wouldn't dump a whole lot of material willy nilly.
But although I understand their point of view on that.
But but they've broken more sources and more more big stories than, you know, all the major investigative reporters in the country combined.
And so what are we complaining about?
You know, like the we should be looking at this as, you know, as somebody who's who's sort of part of part of our world and not and not sort of advocating for the government against them.
Right.
I mean, yeah, just quantitatively, there must be thousands, maybe more than 10,000 news stories out there that cite the Manning leak material, specifically the Iraq and Afghan war logs, the State Department cables, those Guantanamo files, at least in part, if they're not the basis for the whole story, somewhere in paragraph 32, it says, as confirmed by Wikileaks cable, blah, blah, blah, or the State Department cable, that always means Manning's leak, you know, 99% of the time.
And there's thousands of stories from all around the world.
So what these reporters are saying is, that sucks.
You know, how in the world did we let this get to this state of affairs where we have someone providing us with all this pertinent data?
Yeah, no.
And we would, as you say, we don't want to know that stuff.
We wish you never told us any of that.
We wish none of that was ever leaked.
And then they said the same thing about Snowden.
Like, you know, Snowden leaked to us the existence of this vast surveillance program that should basically scare the entire population to its marrow about what the government might be doing.
And, you know, when we're not looking, I mean, I don't remember there being a national debate about whether or not they could collect all of our electronic communications.
And so this leaks, they lie about it initially, then they sort of reluctantly confirm it.
And he's the bad guy.
He's the one in exile.
Right.
I mean, and the media, really the media let the government frame the whole thing as a question of his treachery rather than theirs, which was obviously what was at issue here.
Right.
Yeah.
No.
Why are we not focusing on the intelligence chiefs who lied to Congress about this?
You know what I'm saying?
Like, it just boggles my mind.
I don't understand.
I mean, part of this again gets back to, look, I grew up in a family of journalists.
Journalists, as a child, to me, a reporter was a misfit, somebody who had a personality problem, who disliked anybody in power, anybody who had influence, disliked rich people just instinctively.
Right.
Their whole idea was we're in this job because we just like to be a pain in the ass.
That's who a journalist is.
Then suddenly that kind of person started to disappear from the business in the 80s and 90s.
And we have this completely new kind of person now who's in there who sympathizes with the John Brennans of the world, with the clappers of the world.
And these are the bad guys.
These are the guys which we're supposed to be holding to account.
I just don't understand it.
It blows my mind.
Yeah.
Well, it's, you know, the partisanship and also the hate figure personality.
It's so much easier to just fear a character like, say, Donald Trump, rather than, okay, guys, every single day we got to deal with the systemic problems of the national security state that we can't seem to do anything about.
You know, it's easier to just...
Did you hear the outrageous thing that he said that hurt the feelings of that person?
Oh, I know.
I know.
It's easy.
It's easy.
Yeah.
And as you say, it works for, you know, dish soap dollars for the TV stations.
Yeah.
And don't underestimate the fact that hard reporting, people stay away from it for the same reason that prosecutors stay away from difficult financial cases because they'd rather do the easy hit.
Right.
So you do you do 50 cases about drug dealers because they know how to do those cases and they're easy and juries convict every time.
Right.
And you don't do the price fixing or the, you know, the front running case involving Goldman Sachs or whatever, because those cases are hard.
Well, the same the same phenomenon exists in journalism, like reporters just do not like to dive into topics that that are difficult and that are going to require some difficult reporting to to to uncover.
They'd just rather it's much easier to do a thousand words on a Trump tweet.
I mean, you know, the guy's the guy's been a godsend to our business in that sense.
Right.
All right.
I'm sorry for keeping you so long.
Let me ask you one more thing here.
Sure.
What about accountability, especially for those who in the media, I mean, especially, you know, pundits and reporters who are bad on Iraq war, too?
I don't know why everybody always skips all the lies about Muammar Gaddafi was going to murder every last man, woman and child in Benghazi if we didn't start that war.
What a hoax that was.
At least Bill Clinton pretended 100000 people had already been killed in Kosovo, which wasn't true.
But now we're just going because Benghazi is going to murder every baby in Benghazi.
Why would we believe that?
But anyway, we skip that.
But anyway, how about all the people who were bad on Iraq war, too, and bad on Russiagate, that they all are in exile and have to go get real jobs and don't get to be reporters anymore?
I mean, I'm already seeing again.
I'm not watching TV.
I'm immune from all of this stuff.
That's what's funny.
I'm really looking for.
I haven't been watching TV since like 16, but I saw a little bit of Twitter and I can see how the consensus is over at the Talking Points memo that we were right all along.
See, look at these tidbits of things that we can try to twist to say we're still right.
But on the other side of that is no, they should all be punished and fired and replaced by the people who got it right.
And we know that's not going to happen in any kind of wholesale way.
But there's got to be some form.
There's a thing in comedy where if you're a stand-up comedian and you steal jokes, there's no copyright on that.
But the rest of the comedians hate you and shame you out of the business because you can't do that because it's against how we do things around here and it's an informal code.
And so that's kind of the deal.
We should see that in journalism where no, if you got a Russiagate story wrong, you're gone.
Go and sweep the floor somewhere.
There's no code like that that exists in the business.
In fact, it works the other way.
As long as you're wrong with everybody else, you're going to be supported by the rest of the business.
And you see dramatically that even people who make very, very bad mistakes are sort of retained in the business and often get promoted upward.
Because what they're being rewarded for is their enthusiastic advocacy of a preferred narrative.
So who was one of the most wrong people on Iraq War Two?
Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic.
He wrote some of the most incorrect, fulminating, just hyper-aggressive articles.
And The New Yorker at the time, talking about the urgent need to invade Iraq for X, Y, and Z reasons.
And what's his reward?
He got the editorship of The Atlantic.
He won multiple prizes.
He won the Overseas Press Club Award.
He won an Ellie, the National Magazine Award.
And we just do not, you're going to see in this case, we've already had people win Pulitzers for this stuff.
There's not going to be any accountability.
I mean, I hate to disappoint you, but that's not the way it works.
Yeah, it's a shame.
Well, you know, there's a fan of the show, friend of the show named Cohen Swinkles, who has a blog where he kept the names and the Twitter handles of as many individual alternative media type people and institutions as he possibly could who got this stuff right in order to give credit.
Because there really are.
And there's, you know, a hundred and something people on the list and 20 or 30 websites and organizations and so forth who've been good on this all along.
And so that's really important, you know, to highlight, I think.
But somebody needs to do the opposite, too.
I'm sorry?
Tell him to get in touch with me.
I'd like to see that list.
Oh, OK.
Yeah, I have the link, man.
I'll send it to you.
OK, great.
I'll find it.
And so but yet, no, we need something like that to really catalog and name and shame the authors and the institutions that published certainly the very worst stories, you know, along the lines of this Russiagate stuff and the worst of the pundits in the media.
Because a few years from now, they're going to be sitting there pretending like none of this ever happened.
And we need to be able to remember that.
Yeah, no, you're the one who claimed this.
Remember that?
We do.
Yeah, no.
And the spin that you're already getting is, is, well, you know, his look at his conduct and he he they're essentially saying that he was guilty of a thought crime because the the two part construction is Russia attacked us and Trump was insufficiently upset about it and then tried to obstruct an investigation into whether or not that there was more to it than that.
But the original reporting was very explicit that the you know, that he was a spy, that he was compromised, that he was being blackmailed, that the p-tape death definitely existed, that, you know, that he there were bribes going back and forth, that he had gotten dirty financial deals from from the Kremlin.
You know, he's got a one line exoneration yesterday in the Mueller report.
You know, their names were splashed all over the headlines as as, you know, go betweens and cutouts.
And, you know, this is this is the most immoral behavior that reporters can engage in when we accuse people of something.
And it turns out not to be true.
And we were so incredibly reckless on this front.
And we're going to pretend that it didn't happen.
And you're absolutely right.
Someone needs to I mean, I'm going to do some of it this weekend.
I'm going to try to put out a big thing about like, you know, some of the stuff that the report shows.
There are there are a good 25 or 30 major news stories that the report yesterday that was issued blew up.
So we got we got to like list those to start.
You know, for instance, the the notion that that Trump changed the Republican platform for the Russians, like there's there's like a one line thing.
And this is Oh, by the way, that wasn't true.
Well, that was two weeks of our life or three weeks, you know, dominated the news cycle.
So there were a lot of those things.
And we got you're right.
We got to write it all down.
Yeah, and I like all the big questions on that case, too.
We're all righteous patriots know that we better arm up the junta in Kiev, no matter what, so that they can take on the Russians.
So that what?
Wait, what are we talking about?
Again?
We want to do this because of why.
And if I oppose it, I'm a traitor to the Russians.
When?
Yeah, that's assuming a hell of a lot to get started if you ask me.
And then yes, this as the report shows, they were going to change it to make it worse.
And then these guys said, No, don't.
That's Yeah, not much intervention and no Russian or even involvement by Trump himself, much less the Russians in that decision.
Not only that, the the the final thing that came out was significantly more aggressive toward Russia than the democratic platform was.
So Oh, that's funny.
I didn't realize that.
That's funny.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Because Obama, of course, he did the coup, but then he was afraid to really arm up their army.
You know, he wouldn't go that far.
They wouldn't even go to sanctions and the democratic platform.
And like, I went over that story.
I interviewed the woman who who proposed it initially.
Her name's Diana Denman.
She was 84.
She she wanted to arm Ukraine because they reminded her of the Contras.
Literally, like that was her reason.
And, and, you know, the measure was going to die on committee anyway.
That's all you had to do to find that out was make a couple of phone calls.
So any reporter in the world could have done this story.
But only only one did, you know, Byron York or the Washington Examiner, who's not, I wouldn't say is one of my favorite reporters in the world, but he did the work.
And, um, and yeah, so it's frustrating.
Like, you know, there's there's just lots of lots and lots of stories like that, that we have to go back and remind people that this this stuff took up a lot of our time.
Yeah.
And by the way, you know, in your new book, you should really look at the role of Mueller, who ended up essentially exonerating.
I don't hear this garbage about obstruction or any of this.
He exonerated the president, but only after letting this thing drag on for two years.
And that alone, to me, seems as though he's just playing a part in this push along with the rest of them, especially when, you know, in the Bob Woodward book, the whole case begins with Trump's lawyer.
I think Dowd says to Trump, did you do this?
And Trump says, no, I didn't do this.
And he says, so I can give everything we've got over to them, every scrap of paper.
And I can tell everyone to testify freely.
No problem.
And Trump said, yes.
And then that's exactly what happened.
And Dowd went and told the Mueller team, you guys can have everything carte blanche.
We just ask that you treat us fairly.
Well, man, you know what?
They could have reported that without waiting for Bob Woodward's book to come out.
And, you know, there was the report Greenwald has been reminding us lately about Michael Morell, who was the acting head of the CIA, who had called Trump an agent of the Kremlin in The New York Times later at an event, said, actually, none of that's true.
It's all smoke.
There's no fire.
Believe me, trust me, it ain't anything.
The media could have ran with that.
But, you know, the Mueller investigation, too, could have said, you know, there is a reason that we're not charging anyone with collusion so far here is because none of this is really going that way.
And we'll let you know if things change or some kind of thing.
I don't know the law, but letting it drag on this long itself seems to me to be part of an attack against the elected president.
And I would say the exact same thing if it was Hillary Clinton, who I preferred to lose this time, although I never was a supporter of Trump.
There's no question that that they must have known pretty early that they didn't that there was nothing there on the collusion front, like at the very least, as soon as they found out that that the Trump campaign was having difficulty establishing a line of communication to Wikileaks as late as what, August or, you know, September of 2016.
And to the Russians, too.
And the whole report is full of people trying and failing to arrange meetings.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
And again, the report abruptly concludes that even after the election, that the Russians were having difficulty reaching people in the Trump campaign.
So they must have known this very early, I would think.
And for them to not at least leak it to reporters that, hey, there's nothing there or, you know, hey, dial it down.
That tells me that that look, that just makes me more suspicious about the media furor that lasted this long.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, listen, I'll let you go, but I really appreciate your time.
I'm happy to finally make your acquaintance, especially in these circumstances.
It's a really great piece of work you've got here.
Well, thanks very much, Scott.
And likewise, I'm glad we finally got together.
All right, you guys, that is Matt Taibbi from The Rolling Stone.
And he's the author of Hate Inc.
It's coming out real soon.
And then he's getting right to work on Untitled Gate, which is going to be really nailing down the origins of this story and exactly what it all means.
And we'll definitely be looking forward to that.
Now, check out two of the chapters from the new book, Hate Inc.
They're at substack.
Taibbi.substack.com.
And it's The Scarlet Letter Club.
And Russia Gate is This Generation's WMD, which really drives home how old I am.
It really was a generation ago already, wasn't it?
And so, anyway, check that stuff out.
Great writing there.
And that's all at Taibbi.substack.com.
Thanks again.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.