TAIBBI, M

9 24 cALLING IT twit files fail, elon threw under bus but now fulltime fr speech crusader bs libtard? trump

russia-gate

shillenberger

// glenn greenwald? seduced bromance edgelord?

CRITIQUE OF SHODDY TWITTER FILES WORK LED TO ANTI-MISINFO JIHAD BY JORDAN?

defam sex harrass

omidyar fail start slide?

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name pop 2 26

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bari

tech writer Eoin Higgins and Hachette Book Group in February published Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left. The cover depicts a hand with marionette strings, suggesting that the main subjects of the book—fellow reporter Glenn Greenwald and myself—are puppets controlled by Big Tech overlords such as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and David Sacks.

Higgins’s case against me concerns my involvement with the Twitter Files—a trove of the social media website’s internal communications that Musk sent to reporters, including me, after he acquired the company in 2022. I took significant heat for my coverage, which included Twitter employees’ deliberations about whether to suppress the report about Hunter Biden’s laptop during the 2020 election. IRS agents made an unannounced visit to my home the day I testified in Congress about my findings, and delegate Stacey Plaskett falsely accused me of perjury and threatened to jail me.

Despite this, Higgins says I sold out—literally—by working on the Twitter Files. He claims that I “fully dispensed with any pretense of challenging power” after having “cash[ed] in” with my “benefactor,” Musk.

I’ve never taken money from Musk or any other “tech billionaire on the right,” as Higgins implies. And his lie isn’t harmless. The impressions of trading content for cash—or “selling jeans,” as the Russians call it—is extremely damaging to a reporter’s reputation. So I sued Higgins and Bold Type Books, a division of Hachette, in November for defamation.

Read

Our Reporting at Twitter

I kept the lawsuit largely between us, but Higgins went public recently with a post on his Substack complaining, “Yes, I’m being sued by Matt Taibbi.” The post set off a wave of jeers from the online left-wing peanut gallery, who claim to think my legal challenge clashes with my avowed commitment to freedom of speech. “Not the guy free speech guy [sic]”, said influencer Sabrina “Sabby Sabs” Salvati, adding a laugh emoji. “Even if you disagree with Eoin’s book’s conclusion that Taibbi has sold out, it should be legal to...

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ggl news 2 26

[

Eoin Higgins | Substack

Yes, I'm being sued by Matt Taibbi

As you probably now know, pundit Matt Taibbi is suing me for defamation over my book Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the...

Dec 27, 2025](https://eoinhiggins.substack.com/p/yes-im-being-sued-by-matt-taibbi)

The Free Press

Matt Taibbi: To Protect Free Speech, I’m Suing the Man Who Defamed Me

There's a difference between censorship, which prevents speech, and seeking restitution for a harmful lie already in print.

1 month ago](https://www.thefp.com/p/matt-taibbi-to-protect-free-speech-im-suing-the-man-who-defamed-me)

[

The Pennsylvania State University

Journalist and author Matt Taibbi to present lecture on media, politics Sept. 17

He hosts the podcast Useful Idiots for Rolling Stone and regularly publishes articles on his own Substack account. He is a previous recipient of...

Sep 17, 2025](https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/journalist-and-author-matt-taibbi-present-lecture-media-politics-sept-17)

[

Monthly Review

"The pornography of violence ensnaring Black men"-Gerald Horne talks to Katie Halper & Matt Taibbi

Historian Gerald Horne, author of dozens of books, including the just-out The Dawning of the Apocalypse, talked recently with Matt Taibbi and Katie Halper...

Sep 10, 2025](https://monthlyreview.org/the-pornography-of-violence-ensnaring-black-men-gerald-horne-talks-to-katie-halper-matt-taibbi/)

[

The Arts Fuse

Book Review: “Owned” — How to Buy Left-Wing Journalists

Eoin Higgins's "Owned" is a provocative take on our shifting politics and the instrumental role the media plays in how the superrich...

Aug 2, 2025](https://artsfuse.org/314513/book-review-owned-how-to-buy-left-wing-journalists/)

[

Fox News

Obama now 'squarely in Russiagate crosshairs,' journalist Matt Taibbi claims

DNI Tulsi Gabbard's documents place Obama 'squarely' in the crosshairs of Russiagate, according to journalist Matt Taibbi's reporting on...

Jul 21, 2025](https://www.foxnews.com/media/obama-now-squarely-russiagate-crosshairs-journalist-matt-taibbi-claims)

[

New York Post

FTC must keep up the fight against NewsGuard and its ‘disinformation’ graft

Federal Trade Commission chief Andrew Ferguson is fighting the good fight as the agency stares down a lawsuit from the “news accuracy...

6 days ago](https://nypost.com/2026/02/17/opinion/ftc-must-keep-up-the-fight-against-newsguard-and-its-disinformation-graft/)

[

UnHerd

Is X ruining politics?

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers speaks with journalist and author Matt Taibbi. A former Rolling Stone reporter and now publisher of Racket News,...

Sep 4, 2025](https://unherd.com/watch-listen/is-x-ruining-politics/?edition=us)

[

FAIR

Taibbi Cites Government Attacks on Media to Defend Government Attacks on Media

Taibbi's invocation of “Putin” as a reason why we should not be concerned about Trump's attacks on public broadcasting is an illogical non...

May 6, 2025](https://fair.org/home/taibbi-cites-government-attacks-on-media-to-defend-government-attacks-on-media/)

[

Congresswoman Sydney Kamlager-Dove (.gov)

Kamlager-Dove Holds First Hearing as Top Democrat on House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on South and Central Asia, Calls out Republican Hypocrisy on Free Speech

Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove, Ranking Member of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on South and Central Asia, delivered opening remarks.

Apr 1, 2025](http://kamlager-dove.house.gov/media/press-releases/kamlager-dove-holds-first-hearing-top-democrat-house-foreign-affairs)

---

FAIR AN 5 25

The death of former 1960s radical turned right-wing provocateur David Horowitz brought to mind the time he called me “stupid” (Michigan Daily, 9/8/03) because he disliked a column (Michigan Daily, 9/2/03) I wrote about neoconservatism.

I was reminded of that again just days later when Matt Taibbi (Racket News, 5/4/25), a journalist who left Occupy Wall Street populism for ruling class sycophancy, attacked my recent article, “Cuts to PBS, NPR Part of Authoritarian Playbook” (FAIR.org, 4/25/25). In his response, titled, “No, State Media and Democracy Don’t Go ‘Hand in Hand.’ Just the Opposite,” Taibbi asked, “How nuts do you have to be to think ‘strong state media’ doesn’t have a dark side?”

It’s a straw man argument, with a heavy dose of McCarthyism thrown in to boot. I’d encourage everyone to read both pieces in full, but here I’ll break down the main problems with Taibbi’s piece.

Public vs. state media

IFrame Content

Matt Taibbi (Racket News, 5/4/25): “The above is either satire or written by someone consciously ignoring the history of state media.”*

Taibbi’s main trick is to pretend that “state media” and “public media” are interchangeable. They’re not. State media consists of government propaganda outlets that answer directly to executive authority, rather than independent editors. Public media are independent outlets that receive taxpayer subsidies. As I wrote in my piece, NPR “only gets 1% of its funding directly from the CPB,” the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Obviously, if NPR and PBS were “state media,” Trump wouldn’t need to try to shut them down; he would already control them editorially. That’s not to say that they’re perfectly independent. FAIR writers, including myself (11/26/20), have for decades been critical of NPR and PBS political coverage. FAIR (e.g., 6/1/99, 9/17/04, 5/11/24, 10/24/24) has pointed out again and again that right-wing complaints about supposed left-wing bias in public broadcasting have repeatedly resulted in compromised coverage. (I noted in the very piece Taibbi purports to critique that Republican critics of public broadcasting “use their leverage over CPB funding to push NPR and PBS political programming to the right.”)

FAIR’s Julie Hollar (FAIR.org, 5/2/25) wrote just days before Taibbi’s post that NPR had downplayed the Trump administration’s attack on free speech, taking a false “both sides” approach to the issue. So, yes, FAIR is outspoken about the “dark side” of NPR and PBS, and Taibbi surely knows it. But he doesn’t seem interested in an honest argument.

His words, not mine

:{:{}:

*White House Wire (4/30/25) is already the kind of state media Taibbi warns PBS could turn into.

Taibbi used quotation marks around “strong state media” twice, when those aren’t the words I used—they’re his. He claimed that I was “consciously ignoring the history of state media,” though much of my piece concerned state efforts to force conformity on public outlets. While failing to engage with the rest of my article, he took the reader to Russia in the 1990s, when independent journalists (like himself) were working:

That period, like the lives of many of those folks, didn’t last long. Vladimir Putin sent on May 11, 2000, capping less than ten years of quasi-free speech. “Strong state media” remained, but actual journalism vanished.

I’m very open about my opposition to the tyranny of autocrats shutting down and raiding journalistic institutions (FAIR.org, 5/19/21, 6/8/23, 8/14/23, 10/22/24). And my article noted that other wannabe autocrats are attacking public broadcasters, notably in Italy, Israel and Argentina, a fact that does not undermine but rather supports the idea that there’s a correlation between public broadcasting and democracy.

If Taibbi were truly worried about “state media,” he wouldn’t be mad at a meager government subsidy to NPR or PBS, but instead would show more concern for something like the Trump administration’s White House Wire, “a news-style website that publishes exclusively positive coverage of the president on official White House servers” (Guardian, 5/1/25). And mentioning Putin’s attacks on “independent TV” is certainly a better argument against Trump’s FCC investigations into private US outlets like ABC and CBS than it is against the existence of NPR or PBS.

Taibbi’s invocation of “Putin” and “Russia” as a reason why we should not be concerned about Trump’s attacks on public broadcasting is such an illogical non sequitur, it makes more sense to interpret it as standard-issue McCarthyism. This is bolstered by Taibbi’s invocation of more paranoia about any state subsidy for media:

Yes, Car Talk and the MacNeil/Lehrer Report were cool, but outlets like Neues Deutschland, Télé Zaïre and Tung Padewat more often went “hand in hand” with fingernail factories or firing squads than democracy.

He seemed to be trying to scare the reader into thinking that we are just one episode of Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me! away from the Cambodian genocide.

The neo–Cold War trick is to just say “Putin” enough times in hopes that the reader will eventually realize that the US government funding anything is a sign of impending tyranny. It’s an old joke to accuse greying reactionaries of hating publicly funded snowplows because “that’s socialism,” but that appears to be where Taibbi is these days.

A sloppy attack

*Timothy Neff and Victor Pickard (International Journal of Press/Politics, 7/24): “High levels of secure funding for public media systems and strong structural protections for the political and economic independence of those systems are consistently and positively correlated with healthy democracies.”

Taibbi pretended to refute my claim that “strong public media systems and open democracy go hand in hand,” but in his article’s large block quotation, he omitted two embedded citations to scholarly studies that support this assertion. One of those was from Political Quarterly (3/28/24), the other was an Annenberg School study (3/16/22) whose co-author, Annenberg’s Victor Pickard, has also written about the importance of public media for The Nation (4/15/25).

Taibbi could have challenged those studies if he wanted, and good-faith disagreement is welcome. Omitting them from the quotation, though, leaves out the critical part of my statement.

Taibbi continued:

People who grew up reading the BBC or AFP may imagine a correlation between a state media and democracy, but a more dependable indicator of a free society is whether or not obnoxious private journalism (like the Russian Top Secret,whose editor Artyom Borovik died in a mysterious plane crash) is allowed to proliferate.

I’ve written at length about that dangers that the Trump administration poses when it comes to censorship, intimidating journalists, lawfare against media and using the power of the state to chill speech (FAIR.org, 12/16/24, 1/23/25, 2/18/25, 2/26/25, 3/28/25, 4/29/25). Taibbi ignored this part of my record, which is referenced in part in the very article to which he’s responding. This is crucial, because my defense of PBS and NPR in this instance is part of a general belief that the government should not attack media organizations, public or private.

As someone who read Taibbi enthusiastically when he was a Rolling Stone and New York Press writer, it’s sad to see someone I once admired so sloppily attack FAIR’s defense of press freedom against anti-democratic state power. But on the bright side, his outburst acts as an inspiration for a place like FAIR to continue defending free speech and a free press, while mercilessly calling out state propagandists who disguise themselves as journalists.

---

2023

NTP

Breaking News

Dow down 2,200 points as $6.4T is wiped out in two-day bloodbath

Opinion

Dems’ police-state tactics won’t stop reporters like Matt Taibbi

By Jonathan Turley

Published April 21, 2023

:{:{Updated April 22, 2023,}:

184 Comments

Matt Taibbi has been accused of possible perjury.

State Department’s Global Engagement Center — accused of pushing censorship to combat online ‘disinformation’ — shuts down

Vice President-elect JD Vance departs from the Senate Chambers during a vote in the U.S. Capitol on December 18, 2024 in Washington, DC.

Benjamin Weingarten: Congress’ 1,500-page spending bill hides a sneaky reprieve for federal censors

As every elementary student is told, a single letter can change an entire thought.

Leave off an “S” and your dessert turns into a desert.

A missing “R” turns a friend into a fiend.

For journalist Matt Taibbi, the brief accidental addition of an “A” may not only have changed the identity of a group, but, according to a ranking Democrat, put the convict into the meaning of conviction.

Delegate Stacey Plaskett (D-VI), the ranking member of the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, issued a letter that accused Taibbi of possible perjury because of an error that he made, not in testimony but in a tweet he later corrected.

At issue is Taibbi referring to CISA, the government’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, when he meant to refer to CIS, the Center for Internet Security.

Plaskett’s threatening letter to Taibbi was immediately pushed on MSNBC by host Mehdi Hasan, who was shocked by the added “A” and called for the journalist to be criminally investigated for having “deliberately & under oath misrepresented” the facts.

(It was an ironic moment, as writer Lee Fang noted, given past allegations made against Hasan over false statements.)

For Taibbi, this is only the latest such unnerving moment.

When he was testifying before Congress on government censorship efforts, the IRS sent an agent to his home to look into irregularities on his taxes from years earlier.

Delegate Stacey Plaskett

Delegate Stacey Plaskett issued a letter that accused Taibbi of possible perjury.

Plaskett also attacked Taibbi in the hearing as a “so-called journalist” and said he (and another journalist witness) were “a direct threat” to the safety of others for having reported the censorship story.

And she insisted he reveal his source for his Twitter Files reporting.

Taibbi and others also objected to a demand from Federal Trade Commission Chairwoman Lina Khan for Musk to “identify all journalists” who had access to the Twitter Files.

A Response to a Member of Congress

Sydney Kamlager-Dove, Democrat of California, accused me of serial sex offenses in a public hearing, then said my lack of response was "telling." It's listed below

Matt Taibbi

Apr 03, 2025

3,554

1,425211

Sydney Kamlager-Dove, a Democrat representing California’s 37th district in Los Angeles, began her opening remarks in a House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee hearing Tuesday with a comment directed to me. “To distract from the dumpster fire this administration is pursuing,” she said, the Republicans were “elevating a serial sexual harrasser as their star witness.”

Right after the hearing, she re-tweeted the comment on X and BlueSky, writing, “After this, Republicans gave Matt Taibbi time to defend himself. It’s telling that he didn’t.”

There is not much a person like me can say to a member of Congress hiding behind the protections of the Speech and Debate clause of the Constitution.

One can however respond to a member arrogant enough to repeat those claims on social media. I’ve now done so, in the form of a $10 million libel lawsuit filed today in a New Jersey federal court:

Taibbivkamlagerdove

1.26MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Rep. Kamlager-Dove, no woman has ever accused me of engaging in sexual harrassment once, let alone serially. See you in court. Please do not evade service.

Subscribe to Racket News

Tens of thousands of paid subscribers

News and features by best-selling author and reporter Matt Taibbi, in an independent package molded after I.F. Stone's Weekly. The site contains investigative journalism, satirical commentary, and the America This Week podcast with novelist Walter Kirn.

ggl 4 25

Testimony by Matt Taibbi on Censorship and Free Speech

House.gov

https://docs.house.gov › meetings › HHRG-119-J...](https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU00/20250212/117881/HHRG-119-JU00-Wstate-TaibbiM-20250212-U2.pdf)

PDF

Feb 12, 2025 — Two years ago, when Michael and I first testified, Committee Democrats called us “so-called journalists,” suggested we were bought-off ...

3 pages

[### The Censorship-Industrial Complex

House Judiciary Committee Republicans | (.gov)

http://judiciary.house.gov › committee-activity › hearings](http://judiciary.house.gov/committee-activity/hearings/censorship-industrial-complex)

Feb 12, 2025 — The hearing, "The Censorship-Industrial Complex," will examine the Committee's role in uncovering the Biden-Harris Administration's unconstitutional censorship ...

[### 'Twitter Files' journalist Matt Taibbi spars with Biden's ...

New York Post

https://nypost.com › 2025/04/01 › us-news › twitter-file...](https://nypost.com/2025/04/01/us-news/twitter-files-journalist-matt-taibbi-spars-with-bidens-disinfo-czar-in-censorship-hearing/)

3 days ago — 'Twitter Files' journalist Matt Taibbi spars with Biden's disinfo czar in censorship hearing: 'We don't need a truth squad'. By. Josh ...

[### Hearing on the Weaponization of the Federal Government

Congress.gov

https://www.congress.gov › event › house-event](https://www.congress.gov/event/118th-congress/house-event/116615)

Witnesses ; Mr. Matt Taibbi Twitter Files journalist and author, Taibbi Testimony [PDF 131KB] ; Mr. Michael Shellenberger Twitter Files journalist, author, and ...

[### A Response to a Member of Congress - by Matt Taibbi

Racket News | Matt Taibbi

https://www.racket.news › a-response-to-a-member-of-c...](https://www.racket.news/p/a-response-to-a-member-of-congress)

23 hours ago — Sydney Kamlager-Dove, Democrat of California, accused me of serial sex offenses in a public hearing, then said my lack of response was "telling.

...

[New York Post

‘Twitter Files’ journalist Matt Taibbi spars with Biden’s disinfo czar in censorship hearing: ‘We don’t need a truth squad’

"Twitter Files" journalist Matt Taibbi sparred with former President Joe Biden's onetime "disinformation czar" Nina Jankowicz during a...

2 days ago](https://nypost.com/2025/04/01/us-news/twitter-files-journalist-matt-taibbi-spars-with-bidens-disinfo-czar-in-censorship-hearing/)

[

WSJ

WSJ Opinion: Matt Taibbi's 'Twitter Files' Testimony

Journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger testified before a congressional hearing on the growth of 'a censorship-industrial complex' that violates the...

Mar 9, 2023](https://www.wsj.com/video/wsj-opinion-matt-taibbi-twitter-files-testimony/CECB5252-9F58-40E2-AD77-281669275C5E)

[

Reason Magazine

Democrats Threaten Matt Taibbi With Jail Time Over Twitter Files Testimony

The congresswoman's basis for accusing Taibbi of perjury is a handful of errors that he made during the publication of the Twitter Files. These...

Apr 20, 2023](https://reason.com/2023/04/20/matti-taibbi-stacey-plaskett-jail-time-twitter-files-perjury/)

---

bb 2 25

if you're the kind of person who's ever wondered, "What the hell happened to Glenn Greenwald?" or "Damn, I liked Matt Taibbi during the Iraq War, but what happened?," then Eoin Higgins' new book, Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left is the book for you. In Owned, Higgins paints a harrowing portrait of the internet's dramatic rightward shift over the last decade, illustrating the ways that the once-fringe libertarian ideas of a few Silicon Valley billionaires blossomed into—well, all of this.

Most of the book focuses on the very clear and public political shifts of writer-pundits such as Greenwald and Taibbi. These are voices who were once beloved by a certain swath of leftists (or at least civil libertarians), who once spoke truth to power, and have since succumbed or been seduced by the power of capital. Specifically, those same libertarian Silicon Valley billionaires who believe themselves to be the most oppressed class in America, and will gleefully throw their money at any solution that allows them to not only broadcast this complaint to the rest of the world, but to force people to listen to them, too.

Throughout the book, Higgins writing is crisp and succinct. He simplifies and sums up the early relationships between people such as Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Marc Andreessen; and clearly connects their shared grievances to the post-GamerGate takeover of the social internet. If you, like me, are Extremely Online™, you may already be familiar with some of the topics here, such as the overlap of private equity and Neo-Nazi pressures on places like Substack. But even if you (like me) weren't following these events in real-time, Higgins expertly distills and preserves them for the historical record. I feel like this is a book I could hand to my 75-year-old dad and say, "Do you want to understand what's happening in the world right now? Read this, instead of doomscrolling on your AppleOS News App, and it'll all make sense."

:{:{Another strength of Owned is that Higgins doesn't shy away from that faux-objectivity of much more journalism. He's a human, with a clear perspective on events. In fact, in many ways, he's a character in his own story. Higgins has written for The Intercept; he worked for a time for Callin, the live-call-in-podcasting app that was funded by right-wing billionaires and ultimately folded into the same right-wing-alternative-media-ecosystem as Rumble. He even has a relationship (to a degree) with Greenwald himself, to the point that Greenwald is willing to speak with Higgins about a book which is very clearly painting Greenwald in a negative light.}:

(Taibbi was, erm, less willing to participate in Higgins' research.) Higgins does a phenomenal job chronicling how these civil libertarian, anti-authoritarian voices could both be gradually seduced by power; and also how such a heelturn was always inevitable, because it was always intrinsic to their belief systems, in a way that's made even more clear in hindsight.}:

:{:{Owned is by no means light reading; it's a real-life horror story, detailing a turn of events that felt both abrupt yet inevitable. And Higgins does a fantastic job of curating that story. There's also something strangely comforting (for lack of a better word) about reading the book at a time like this.}:

It's an educational and enlightening alternative to the constant churn and "flooding the zone" of the news cycle—all of which results from the events that transpire in this very book. If anything, Owned left me feeling better prepared for the current state of the world. It might be a chronicle of recent events that I had already followed closely, but Higgins articulates those happenings with a distinct moral clarity that even I struggled to explain as it all unfolded.}:

---

MSN

The Substack invasion: When the tech bros came for journalism, everything changed

as I said to journalist Eoin Higgins at one point during our recent conversation, in this case the call is coming from inside the house. I didn’t just mean that one journalist was interviewing another — about a book that is, itself, largely about the world of journalism — although that’s true enough. Or even that three articles that originally appeared in Salon (by way of Higgins’ previous gig at the Institute of Public Accuracy) now appear in his new book, "Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left," although that’s true too. (One such Salon article is linked below.)

What I meant was that Higgins and I (who have never met in person, for the record) feel uncomfortably close in some ways to the subject of his book, which tells the story of how the semi-legendary crusading journalists Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi gradually drifted toward the MAGA-friendly right, and made lots of money in doing so. It’s not just the story of two cantankerous dudes becoming far more cantankerous — although, as Higgins himself suggests, that’s undeniably part of the story — but it’s also not some MSNBC propaganda narrative about dissident left-wingers actually being paid shills for Russia (as has been suggested, I believe, about both of those guys).

Where the discomfort comes in is that Higgins and I are both precisely the kind of civil-libertarian leftists who agreed, to a significant degree, with the scathing criticisms that Greenwald and Taibbi (among others) directed at the liberal-Democratic consensus during the Obama years and the first Trump term. Higgins was a friend and admirer of Greenwald’s in particular; I knew Greenwald less well (although I was a staff writer for Salon when he was a columnist here) but have defended his prickly perspective on several occasions and have avoided criticizing him in print. Neither of us knew Taibbi well, but his ferocious reporting on the George W. Bush administration and the financial crisis of 2008, for Rolling Stone and elsewhere, created a reputation that has now diminished nearly all the way to nothing.

Once it became impossible to follow these two into the lucrative tech-bro spaces of Substack and the so-called intellectual dark web — where they joined other media refugees like former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss — the painful question emerged of what had happened and why. Some answers were entirely too obvious (ka-ching); others seemed too painful.

Greenwald became a regular guest on Tucker Carlson's Fox News show during its latter months on the air; Taibbi wrote up the "Twitter Files," apparently convincing himself that a trove of internal corporate records personally curated and delivered by Elon Musk somehow qualified as a scoop. As Higgins tells the story in “Owned,” which at times feels like one of those thrillers where you can’t quite work out who the good guys are, all of this was part of a much larger pattern — a campaign by some of the richest men in the world to control the flow of information, especially when it was about them. With Donald Trump back in the White House and Musk apparently in control of the federal workforce, a sinister new chapter appears to have begun. Let’s let Eoin Higgins take it from here.

This interview transcript has been edited for clarity and length: For instance, I’ve placed our discussion of Substack at the top even though it occurred toward the end of our conversation.

Substack plays an important role in this story, and even to media professionals its appearance and prominence over the past few years were startling and unexpected. So tell us how that platform came into being and what it represents in your book.

Sure. Substack is a newsletter service. It was started, I think. in 2017. It's basically, like, a successor to Blogspot. It's where people can write whatever they want. And in this case, it has a great UX system. It looks great. It has streamlined subscription and revenue generation. It's a very slick, very good product. In 2019, I believe, tech billionaire Marc Andreessen led a funding round and put a lot of money into it. With that money, Substack was able to start giving paid deals to writers to entice them from their jobs, to come over to Substack and write there. Effectively, what happened is that they peeled off some mainstream writers, and they started to find that the politics of the people there began to tilt right, especially on some socially conservative topics like trans rights, which has been kind of the big one.

I see the transphobia stuff as part of the story, but the bigger part of the story is the peeling off of these established writers from the publications that they wrote for previously, which devalues the publications with their departure. It decentralizes media in a way that is not inherently negative in a vacuum, but when it's being pushed by someone like Andreessen — someone who does not like the media, because the media can be critical of him — you have to wonder what the reasoning is. I believe that was the reason: an attempt to decentralize the media and kind of break it down.

Right. So just to summarize that briefly, it was both an attempt to foreground more right-wing voices, accidentally or otherwise, and an attempt to disempower or undercut more traditional forms of media.

Yeah, I mean, that's totally my belief.

Well, here you are, Eoin, with this book about this Big Tech attack on media hitting less than a month into the second Trump administration. You couldn't have planned that any better. Did you actually predict all this?

Honestly, no. When Bold Type Books pitched me on doing this, they said, we want someone to write about Glenn and Matt, and you've been suggested by a number of people as the right person to do this. I was like, yes, of course, but I would also like to make it about how tech billionaires were investing all this money into alternative media. Not alternative media like Salon, but alternative media like Substack and Callin and and all this stuff, in order to create a media ecosystem that favored them, one that would act almost like a PR arm for them.

At the time, it wasn’t that explicit, but I said, I would also like to dig into these guys, I want to talk about where the money is coming from. They were like, yeah, that sounds great. So I wrote it pretty quickly, and we were going through the editing process. The draft was done in February 2024, and I was like, let's try and get it out before the election. They were like, OK, that’s not going to happen. That's not how publishing works.

I complained about that, but they convinced me that this was the right way to go. So we set the publishing date, and Joe Biden was still the nominee. Then, when Kamala Harris came in, I was like, this is good for the world, but not necessarily good for my book, right? [Laughter.]

I was really involved with pushing for an earlier date, and it turned out that I was completely wrong. I should have listened to them in the first place. I felt like there was no way that Trump would get elected again. I just didn't think there was any way that people would want to do that again. I think I just misjudged how bad things had been during Biden. I had a massive blind spot there.

So now the book is coming out — and look at what Elon Musk is doing, look at the Peter Thiel stuff. The tech stuff has started to become more important than the media stuff, although I think it’s really important to understand the media stuff, the information ecosystem that these people have created around them. So this is hitting at this time where, you know, a lefty, independent book focused on media criticism probably would not have the same buzz.

Yeah, and you somewhat anticipate my next question. Why write a book about two journalists who, as famous or notorious as they may be in our profession, are not widely known to the general public? The answer, in some ways, is that that’s not what your book is really about. But I’d like to hear your answer.

Well, I think that Glenn and Matt are well known to a certain age cohort. I think people who were in college between about 2005 to 2015 definitely know who these guys are. Not because of their Twitter accounts and their punditry, but because of the work they did. Specifically, I mean, Glenn's reporting on Edward Snowden, that was world-changing stuff. That’s in the history books forever. No matter what else he ever does, he's always going to be known for that. It’s not a footnote.

Matt Taibbi is less prominent, but certainly people who were in school or who were young in general during the financial crisis are aware of him. I have a lot of friends who are apolitical, you know, working people who don't have the same deranged interest in politics that I do, right? They’re just not interested. But they know who these guys are.

That’s interesting. I wouldn’t have guessed that.

Well, because they're my age, they're in their mid 40s, right? Writing a book about the tech takeover of media — I mean, you could sell that book now, but when I was contracted to do this, there wasn't the same huge interest in it. So using the journeys of these two people who are highly influential was a good way of exploring the themes around tech and control of information in the media. So I would gently push back on the idea that they're not that well known, but maybe the point you're getting at is that they are not nearly so influential now, right? And that's definitely true.

Their influence was starting to wane a little when I started to write the book, but I've been surprised by how far they've fallen off the radar, over the last year-plus. With Taibbi, the big thing was the "Twitter Files." He got some headlines out of that, but people aren't really paying a lot of attention to him anymore. Glenn is siloed off on Rumble, which is good for him money-wise, but his audience has to be shrinking at this point. I mean, there's not a lot of people who are interested in that platform. I don't want to say he doesn't have a large audience, but it’s no longer a hugely influential audience. I think The Intercept needed him. That’s undeniable, if you look at the way things have gone for them since he left. But the reverse is also true. He needed them as well, and I think they both are worse off now.

Yeah, I agree with most of that. I definitely agree with you on Greenwald's importance when it comes to the Snowden revelations, and that speaks to why you were the person to write this book. If you understand the metaphor, the call is coming from inside the house, right? You understand the worldview that these guys, at least at one time, appeared to represent. You’re not coming at them from the outside, from an MSNBC perspective or a mainstream Democratic perspective. You’re not going to accuse them of being Russian agents. You’re more closely aligned with these guys than a lot of their critics would be.

Yeah. I mean, totally. When I was in college — I went to college late — that was when Glenn had just started to write for Salon. And, like, immediately, he was speaking to me, I was a fan. And my good friend in college, who I used to talk about this stuff with a lot, he felt the same way about Taibbi. I was totally locked in. I think I describe myself in the book as a civil libertarian leftist, and I still am. The specifics of my political belief system are based in my reaction to the War on Terror under George W. Bush. For someone like that, for someone with my views, who better to express that, at that time, than a polemicist like Glenn Greenwald, who was able to put that stuff into words and take the fight to the people who were spreading the mainstream message of war and authoritarianism?

Your book strikes me, in a way, as a companion piece to Spencer Ackerman’s "Reign of Terror," which is probably the best single work on how the post-9/11 era and the War on Terror changed this country. Do you agree with that?

If you're gonna say that my book is a companion to Spencer's, that's a huge compliment. Yeah, a lot of the front half of the book is my response to the War on Terror, which was what Glenn was addressing at the time. I’m obviously not neutral, right? I'm being very clear that I agree with him. I still agree with him about a lot of this stuff.

There's a moment, and this is quoting Glenn, when he’s talking about how his friendship with Rachel Maddow fell apart, and he says, "I thought we believed the same things, and then she just became this establishment voice for this kind of state power, War on Terror stuff, as long as as it was the Democrats doing it." I think there's a lot of truth to that. I understand that frustration, just as I understand Matt’s frustration in "Hate Inc." when he talks about how Maddow and MSNBC are damaging to their audiences.

But where they both start to lose me is that if you're going to say that MSNBC is as damaging as Fox, I'm going to need to see more evidence for that. Because with Fox, I mean, it’s about the audience. If you're radicalizing the audience of Fox News, the results are going to be a lot worse than if you radicalize a liberal audience, quite frankly. So if you line those two up and make a parallel comparison, the way that Taibbi does explicitly in “Hate Inc.,” and like both Glenn and Matt did for a long time — before they both came to this conclusion that, actually, the big problem is the Democrats — I think you're kind of playing yourself at that point. You’re not really thinking clearly.

It was almost painful to me to read those early sections of your book, because the critique that both of those guys, and especially Glenn, have offered about mainstream Democrats capitulating to certain ideas about state power and mass surveillance — I mean, that's all true, right? I imagine you and I are in accord on that. And the unanswerable question that I have is, OK, if you make that critique, where does the loss of perspective come in? How do you decide that the enemy of your enemy has to be your friend now, and that somehow the Republican side is less guilty of, you know, truly noxious things? I don't get that part at all.

Yeah, I don't know how that really happens. I mean, I can talk about how I see it happening, and I will. But I think there's a more interesting question that you're asking, which is, like, how does that happen psychologically, right? My answer to that is also, I don't know. I wish I knew, because I can kind of lay out the facts on what happened.

With Glenn, I see somebody who aligned himself with liberals during the the latter Bush years and made a career for himself doing this, pushing back on the civil-liberties infringements and the authoritarianism of the Bush regime. Then he watched liberals, over eight years, just abandon all of that because of their partisan affiliation with Barack Obama. OK, so I'm with him on that 100 percent. Like, there's no question. That’s why, in most of my political writing, I'm so harsh on Democrats, because I just don't care about Republicans. I think they're a lost cause. I don't care, right? I mean, they can cause a lot of damage. They matter in that way, and should be criticized in that way. But I'm not criticizing them, because I don't expect anything else.

And then Trump becomes president. I don’t think Glenn was a supporter of his, right? But what he didn't like, which was the same as me and the same as almost everybody I quote in the book favorably, was the Democrats becoming obsessed with Russia and refusing to address any of the things that got us the point where Trump got elected in the first place. They squandered two-plus years where they could have been fighting back against the Trump agenda on, you know, conspiracy theories and pretending that there was some vast overseas plot to overthrow the U.S. That was a massive, massive mistake. That was a disaster.

But Glenn took this and instead of having it become, hey, let's continue to resist state power irrespective of who's in power, he became completely obsessed with Democrats and liberals and the way that they were responding. He’s always had some right-winger to him, you know, some conservative beliefs. That's very American of him. Most Americans aren't one or the other, right? That's fine. But he basically decided that liberals were the problem, and I think the attention that he got from that, and the way that he got flattered and worked by the alt-right media machine, including Tucker Carlson and Fox News, and then the tech guys, I think that just solidified it. And then when he found that there was an opportunity, he took it.

Meaning an opportunity to go to an independent platform — Substack, in this case — and make a lot of money doing so?

Yeah. I feel like that had been building for a while, and when it happened, it wasn't super surprising. Even then, I held out some hope. You know, I was still friendly with him on a superficial online level. But he just went too far in a direction that I couldn't follow, and then I started to see him as this character who was more interested in his own advancement than in any of the principles that he had built his career on. Maybe I was finally seeing him for who he really was, you know? A lot of people would probably argue that.

As far as Taibbi goes, I mean, he also rejected the Russiagate stuff in probably harsher terms than Glenn did, which earned him a lot of anger from liberals. Then the #metoo scandal hit [regarding allegations from Taibbi's earlier career in Russia] and I think he just slowly drifted to the right. You know, I think he was always regarded with suspicion by some people on the left. Liberals were eager to have a reason to be done with him anyway. So that was kind of a perfect storm and by 2020, COVID kind of drove him insane. Maybe that happened before COVID, but now the stuff he's saying, it's just completely out to lunch. He's just an anti-vax conspiracy theorist. He seems to be really flailing, trying to find any kind of audience that he can at this point, like with the “Twitter Files.” He obviously thought that was going to be his noted moment, and it just didn't hit.

That was so lame. I don't know how somebody who worked as a professional journalist for so long could think that was really going to work, or could fail to understand that he was being played, or was willfully playing himself.

No, I don't either. I've always maintained that while there wasn't much in there that was earth-shattering, it was really interesting to see how they made decisions. But it's not world-changing reporting, and then when you find out that Elon Musk cherry-picked this stuff, and there was other stuff Matt couldn't look at. I think it just wasn't there. That was another disappointment in a career that had increasingly become about disappointment. And you know, then the right was willing to support him and be friendly to him, so he just embraced their beliefs.

One thing your book winds up being about, maybe by accident, is the importance of ideology. You make the argument that neither of these guys was strongly motivated by ideology. Maybe Greenwald had an ideology, kind of, and people interpreted it in different ways at different times. But I think we can say that neither of these guys was a committed leftist for ideological reasons. I’m not the kind of person who thinks that's the most important thing in life, and I bet you’re not either. But that’s part of the story here, right?

Yeah. I mean, as it turned out, Glenn didn't really believe in a lot. I think he is committed to the cause of Palestine, or at least committed against Israel. I don't know if that's because of deep belief, but I don't see any reason to read him in bad faith on that. Similarly, I don't know if his belief in free speech is based on a belief that everybody should have the right to speak, or if he just likes fighting for people whose speech is seen as repulsive. But, you know, his rants are pretty fungible. He's very happy to turn on people and say the opposite thing that he said a few months or a year ago. I think he's just kind of self interested.

As far as Taibbi goes, I mean, I say this in the book, but they’re both Gen X, right? Like, they just have this kind of nihilism. Yeah, I can say that, because I'm on the cusp. [Laughter.] I'm not a millennial talking about Gen X from afar. I don’t want to make it sound totally self-important, but I do think there is something that's kind of nihilistic: “Don’t sell out, man,” even as you're selling out. That kind of thing.

There's a quote by Glenn in the epilogue. I gave him a whole block quote because I just thought it was so interesting. He was describing Taibbi, but he was kind of describing himself too, talking about getting more conservative as you get older. I really thought that was kind of a perfect way to describe a lot of what happened.

When I was reading over the transcript, I was like, if this was just some guy, a lawyer or whoever, who had the same politics Glenn had during the Bush administration and was now in his mid-50s, who hadn’t had this history of being a big-time journalist and writing books that sold hundreds of thousands of copies — if this was just some guy saying this, it makes sense. You get more conservative as you get older, and maybe you decide that liberalism has gone too far once it starts to annoy you to the point that you start feeling uncomfortable. You know, there's nothing particularly unique about that. I think that does have something. I don't think it's everything. I think it’s something.

It's definitely something. Any final words?

What I would like your readers to do, whether they are fans of Glenn from his days at Salon or after, or they are opponents of Glenn and Matt, whichever they are, I invite them to come into this with an open mind. I have a defined point of view that I think comes through in this book, but I also pride myself on being as fair as possible. Matt wouldn’t talk to me, but I gave Glenn every opportunity to push back on what people are saying. I don’t know whether Glenn comes off well, but we spoke for nearly three hours, and you definitely get his side of the story.

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an 1 25

jay B w GG

If I have to pick only one from the list of nepotistic freaks, ghouls, B-list celebs, lost souls, Hitlerian zealots, and bunglers that will comprise U.S. President Donald Trump's inner circle of appointees, satellite charlatans, and court jesters, I am going to go with the one with the highest body count. There are plenty of zombies in Trump's starting lineup that would give you goosebumps—people who would cause you to choke on a sip of coffee and double check the pistol under your suit jacket if you met them in a diner to talk about internment camps and environmental deregulation. Picking the most terrible of these dregs is no easy task.

We have a serial pet murderer, a dumpy bald version of Reinhard Heydrich, and a bevy of cheerleaders for ecocide. Among Trump's cabinet picks there is a guy with a fetish for bear meat and whale carcasses and a viable plan to bring back smallpox and polio, but it takes more than a nostalgic and wistful longing for diseases of long ago to excite me. There is a certain irony to choose the most upright, clean-cut, impressively credentialed, and soft spoken of this hall of Hell hounds to be my best of the worst. Few things inspire cold sweat beads of fear like a murderer masquerading as a nice guy. Think of Ted Bundy as a Trump appointee.

I have to select Jay Bhattacharya (Trump's nominee to take over Francis Collins' former niche as director of The National Institutes of Health) as my absolute favorite monster from among the whole entourage of moral mutants and groveling sycophants. Bhattacharya would not raise your suspicions if he knocked on your door to deliver pamphlets—I would happily take a copy of The Watchtower and Awake from this reassuring man. He would bring a glow of satisfaction to most parents if their daughter brought him home. Hell, he even has ardent fans on the so-called left—the Tucker Carlson fan club comprised of Glenn Greenwald, Jimmy Dore, and Matt Taibbi. You can toss Russell Brand in there too. In a game of free association, we casually link Bhattacharya with the issue of free speech—recall that Twitter once censored this honest doctor. Jacobin, in 2020, did a softball interview with one of Bhattacharya's ideological partners, Martin Kulldorff. On the left we sometimes worry more about a killer's rights to free speech than we do about his raised dagger.

Bhattacharya was never about free speech, he was about giving a thunderous voice to the corporate aspiration to kill you for profit.

Free speech has been a distracting shibboleth for many sincere people, even though free speech has little meaning in a media system dominated by cash. The narrative promoted by both fascists and assorted enablers holds that Bhattacharya challenged the powerful forces of the “deep state” and was censored for his courage.

You might recall that the Stanford Professor of medicine coauthored the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) along with Sunetra Gupta of Oxford, and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard. The rightwing Covid-19 gambit enjoyed unlimited oil industry funding and a mandate to assemble tenured prostitutes from academia to bamboozle the public. Jeffrey Tucker of the American Institute for Economic Research—a Koch Network outpost in Great Barrington, Massachusetts with a plump endowment from stock trading—must have had great confidence in the public tendency to skip the fine print. Leading up to, and following the pandemic, Bhattacharya has held fellowships and professional associations with The Hoover Institute, The Epoch Times, Hillsdale College, and The Brownstone Institute. The Brownstone is an Astroturfed organization with a Brooklyn visual motif and an Austin, Texas mailing address.

This Great Barrington Declaration spinoff—yet another brain child of the restlessly promiscuous, Koch affiliated, Jeffrey Tucker—specializes in Covid-19 minimizing, and anti-vax propaganda while dabbling in climate change denial. Walker Bragman and Alex Kotch revealed that the Brownstone is largely funded by dark money. To appreciate Bhattacharya’s mastery of absurdity, consider his statement in this 2022 interview posted at The Hoover Institute's Website:

It's a disaster that it's become a partisan thing. Public health, when it is partisan, is a failed public health.

If there is one essential talent that a fascist henchman needs, it is an utter immunity to self scrutiny, irony, and hypocrisy. I recall that Rudolf Hoss—the infamous commandant at Auschwitz—remarked in his dutifully composed autobiography (requisitioned by his British Jailers, postwar, prior to hanging), that his administration succeeded (I am paraphrasing) due to the cooperation of staff and prisoners alike. He could not wrap his head around the concept of victims and perpetrators having different agendas. They all worked together in a common purpose in Hoss' broken brain. Likewise, Bhattacharya has a Hoss-like inability to imagine that his narrative might be transparently nonsensical—how can a man affiliated with nearly every institution in the Koch Network not be self conscious when complaining of partisan medical narratives?

Bhattacharya's GBD is little more than libertarian rhetoric shaped to the contours of public health. Libertarian public health is a flagrant oxymoron—the task that Bhattacharya will be handed in a fascist oligarchy will be one that he has already done quite brilliantly—get the fuck out of the way and pretend that the mountain of bodies is an offering to the god of freedom.

Libertarian metaphor is wonderfully adaptable, like an elastic pair of stretch pants—one size fits all. Inaction is always in the service of human well-being. The climate regulates itself—"drill baby, drill." Guns need no regulations either, the "good guy with a gun" provides a natural balance. Bhattacharya, Gupta, and Kulldorff figured out the libertarian essence of the Covid-19 story—the pandemic would fizzle out via the designs of nature (herd immunity!). The mandate for the government public health agencies was to use magic and disappear. And that is what Bhattacharya will do, make healthcare as ephemeral as a slight-of-hand handkerchief. His role is one of absence, abdication, retreat—but ultimately one of corporate fidelity, privatization, and the empowering of insurance companies and other profit-seeking medical companies to feed upon a sickly public.

Herd immunity was the whole tale in the GBD—the entire document can be read by a second grader in 20 seconds, but I can condense it into a three second sentence: Let everyone walk into the pandemic like it was a fourth of July stroll in the park, and, bingo—herd immunity!

There was a tiny bit about "focused protection" for the old and the sick. There was even a suggestion that old folks ought to have their groceries delivered, but not a whisper about who would pay for it. Of course we all know that some 40% of U.S. residents are afflicted with obesity, an enormous risk factor for Covid-19 mortality. We might add in all the smokers, lead- and mercury-poisoned masses, and the generally compromised health of a nation long on high fructose corn syrup and short on medical coverage. What you won't find in the GBD is a word about contact tracing, isolation, support for workers, mask wearing, and equipment for afflicted individuals—you know, the stuff that South Korea did to reduce Covid-19 harms by a factor of five compared to the U.S. Bizarrely, Bhattacharya belatedly renounced “herd immunity” in a *Salon* interview. WTF? It was all about focused protection he explained.

The deep state censored Bhattacharya, the truth teller, and now he will lead the very agency that suppressed him. The truth is a little more nuanced. Bhattacharya and his fellow medically credentialed whores had a bigger platform than former Chief Medical Adviser Anthony Fauci ever had. With Trump's appointment of Scott Atlas to his Covid-19 Task Force, the GBD nearly became the de facto inspiration for U.S. policy.

According to *The Lancet*, some 40% of US Covid-19 deaths were preventable—about a half a million deaths could be loosely traced to public recalcitrance regarding pandemic protocol. How many of these victims can be directly traced to the influence of Bhattacharya and the GBD? I can't venture an exact figure, but if you line up all the wicked, unqualified, strange, and misshapen beings who will guide Trump's administration into the stormy seas of fascism, not a single one—not Kash Patel, RFK Jr., Kimberly Guilfoyle, Mike Huckabee, Kari Lake, Jared Kushner, Tulsi Gabbard, or anyone else can be linked to the incalculable measures of suffering that Jay Bhattacharya shepherded into history.

This is how Benjamin Mateus, writing for the *World Socialist Web Site* described the GBD:

The AIER, a libertarian think-tank, which posits as their aim “a society based on property rights and open markets,” is engaged in a highly reactionary, anti-working-class, and anti-socialist enterprise. The declaration has been partly funded by the right-wing billionaire, Charles Koch, who hosted a private soiree of scientists, economists, and journalists to provide the homicidal declaration a modicum of respectability and formulate herd immunity as a necessary global policy in response to the pandemic.

Derrick Z. Jackson described the GBD as a plan for "herding people to slaughter." If any of you take issue with my favoring Jay Bhattacharya as Trump's most evil selection, when did Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, or Tulsi Gabbard ever herd people to slaughter?

I am not denying that there are other abominable sociopaths who will be vying for crumbs at the master's table. Lee Zeldin and Doug Burgum as heads of the Environmental Protection Agency and Secretary of the Interior respectively, might someday cause more deaths than the piddling few hundred thousand that I have speculatively traced to Bhattacharya. In fact, the wholesale, escalating assassination of the natural world will act in tandem with our disassembled, privatized medical system. You will get to live downstream from an industrial pig slaughterhouse, with no medical insurance, and no funding for public health.

Zeldin, Burgum, and Bhattacharya might be thought of as crossing guards for the grim reaper, or maybe you might prefer to picture them as scare crows, mannequins, or plastic fuck dolls—things that have no inner lives and serve as extensions of our fantasies.

Bhattacharya was never about free speech, he was about giving a thunderous voice to the corporate aspiration to kill you for profit. Bhattacharya whined about school closings but never acknowledged the 6 million U.S. children now potentially ruined by long Covid.

As you read about the fires turning LA into an ash heap, and Trump's plans to drill and frack until the entire globe achieves end-Permian parity, be aware that the styrofoam inhabitants of Trump's administration will do no more to alleviate your misery than so many cardboard boxes sitting in the storage rooms of Amazon. If we want relief we'll have to plan unprecedented acts of resistance.

One last thought—look at the Rorschach blot below and ask yourself...

www.commondreams.org

Is this an image that summons worries about free speech denied, or does this picture remind you that the oil industry owns our future?

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Is the Entire World Conspiring to Make It Look Like Trump Lost the Debate?

412 Comments

the national interest Sept. 12, 2024

Is the Entire World Conspiring to Make It Look Like Trump Lost the Debate? An intriguing theory by Matt Taibbi.

By Jonathan Chait, who’s been a New York political columnist since 2011.

In the immediate aftermath of the presidential debate, most reporters and analysts conveyed a similar narrative of what had transpired: Kamala Harris baited Donald Trump into an angry, frequently incoherent performance.

Why did so many journalists who witnessed the same event describe it so similarly? To Matt Taibbi, a popular commentator who has migrated from liberal-hating leftist to liberal-hating Trump apologist, there could be only one explanation: The entire news media was taking orders from the Democratic Party.

Taibbi’s post-debate column, headlined, “DNC Talking Points Become Instant Post-Debate Headlines,” advances a bold hypothesis. Taibbi amasses suspicious evidence of media collusion:

Conspiracies, pet-eating, and the “same old tired playbook” figured prominently in morning headlines. “Harris baits Trump over and over,” wrote the Christian Science Monitor. “Harris baits an aging Trump into being his grumpiest, weirdest self,” was Salon’s take. “Harris Baits and Batters Trump,” wrote the Miami Herald. “Harris Baits Trump Into Arguments,” added CNN. “Harris Baits Trump: Inside their Fiery Debate,” was another Times headline, while The Wall Street Journal went with “Harris Baits Trump in Fiery Presidential Debate.” There were cheers that Harris was able to “bait him into defending himself rather than talking about issues.” And on and on. Instantly, bait everywhere. No wonder Jake Tapper talked about fishing after the event.

“As one of the last relics of the ‘Boys on the Bus’ era, I don’t recall campaign messaging being this crude, or politicians, press, and audience acting so overtly as a chorus,” he writes, “the DNC or RNC just backing up to the commentariat, dumping loads of phrases, and seeing them instantly converted to conventional wisdom, that’s new.”

Taibbi’s theory suffers from two serious flaws. The first lies in the linear nature of time. Taibbi seizes on a Democratic Party press release summarizing reactions to the debate and concludes that the reactions were implanted by the party into the media. But the news release came after the reactions. That is how it was able to quote them.

The simplest account of how this occurred, and one that comports with mainstream physics, is as follows:

The debate occurred.

Many observers, witnessing the debate, had more or less the same impression.

They recorded their impression on social or traditional media.

The Democratic Party’s media-relations staff read these accounts and shared some of them.

I believe this makes much more sense than Taibbi’s belief that the Democrats secretly instructed a wide array of journalists what to say happened at the debate.

The second flaw with Taibbi’s analysis is that the belief Trump looked terrible was shared by many people who could not possibly be controlled by the Democratic message machine. As the debate occurred in real time, online betting markets moved in Harris’s direction, and Trump’s scammy meme stock plunged.

What’s more, the conclusion that Harris effectively baited Trump into an incoherent performance was echoed by many observers who are sympathetic to Trump. “Trump Took the Bait. Harris Kept Her Cool,” wrote Eli Lake in The Free Press. “He rose to the bait repeatedly when she baited him,” moaned Brit Hume on Fox News. “She won the debate because she came in with a strategy to taunt and goad Mr. Trump into diving down rabbit holes of personal grievance and vanity that left her policies and history largely untouched. He always takes the bait, and Ms. Harris set multiple traps so he spent much of the debate talking about the past, or about Joe Biden, or about immigrants eating pets, but not how he’d improve the lives of Americans in the next four years,” complained The Wall Street Journal editorial page.

If Trump’s performance was in any way flawed, Taibbi argues, it is only because the moderators rigged the contest in Harris’s favor. “The world of that debate contained no speech panic, no arrest of Pavel Durov, no assassination attempt, no cover-up of Biden’s health, no oddity in the sudden embrace of Dick Cheney, no mention of a half-dozen bizarre things that only just happened,” he insists.

Interestingly enough, Taibbi’s assessment of Trump’s performance is much more forgiving than that of Trump’s own advisers, who were apoplectic over his incoherent rants. “The [former] president was supposed to pivot but Trump blew it,” a campaign insider tells Marc Caputo. “He was supposed to make her own the Biden record. That didn’t really happen.” Trump advisers unloaded to Axios, noting that Trump simply declined to exploit the opportunities given to him by ABC News. “He was told to hold her accountable for the deadly, hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan. Yet when the moderators teed up that softball twice, he swung at other topics.”

So where a supermajority of the viewing public, investors, betting markets, numerous conservative pundits, and Trump advisers all saw the same thing, Taibbi discerned something totally different. The Donald Trump Taibbi watched was a lone voice of reason, much as Taibbi sees himself:

Trump kept lashing out like a person clinging to an outdated conception of sanity, like he hadn’t gotten the reality-by-fiat memo …

They surrounded Trump with rigid consensus framing and watched him flail against it, which did make him look frustrated, old, and at times like a candidate for the political glue factory. But crazy? Not sure about that. If conventional wisdom says you’re crazy, that doesn’t make it true. What if it’s the other way around?

Yes, perhaps the only two sane people in the universe are Donald Trump and Matt Taibbi. Or maybe there is some other explanation.

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prize w/ BS doc

Matt Taibbi discusses what he found in "The Twitter Files" at RCP''s first Samizdat Prize award ceremony last month and what the public needs to know about censorship and free speech:

MATT TAIBBI: It was a lot like the journalistic version of the golden ticket in "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory," to look through the secret files of one of the world's biggest corporations.

The first thing we were looking for actually had to do with Miranda's story, and I thought because of a couple of interviews involving Mark Zuckerberg we would maybe find a few emails from the FBI about that one story. We knew that had been suppressed, and ironically we didn't find a whole lot about Miranda's story, but we did find within days a whole galaxy of things that said, "Flagged by FBI," "Flagged by DHS," "Flagged by HHS," "Flagged By Treasury." We realized there was this huge operation that spanned the entire federal government to pressure not just Twitter, but two dozen at least internet companies to suppress different kinds of information.

There's a journalist here who writes for RealClear, Aaron Maté, where the FBI basically passed a request from the Ukrainian Secret Service to take this guy off Twitter. It was a whole long list of spreadsheets full of requests about all these different journalists, and the scale of it was mind-boggling. That is what unites all three of us, we were all caught up in this story of mass censorship that until very recently was hidden. This has to be out in the open more, people need to know more about it.

Dave Rubin of "The Rubin Report" hosts a panel with the winners of the first RealClearPolitics Samizdat Prize -- "Twitter Files" journalist Matt Taibbi, "Great Barrington Declaration" co-author Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, and NY Post reporter and "Laptop From Hell" author Miranda Devine. The three...

Carl Cannon: We Salute the Courage of "Samizdat Prize" Winners Matt Taibbi, Miranda Devine, and Dr. Jay BhattacharyaMarch 29, 2024

RCP Washington bureau chief Carl Cannon introduces the three winners of RCP's Samizdat Prize, Matt Taibbi, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, and Miranda Devine, and explains how they stood up to censorship and pressure from the government, media, and academia. CARL CANNON: We all remember when COVID-19...

DesRosiers: RealClear Readers Want Viewpoint Diversity, You Want to Think Outside Your TribeApril 02, 2024

RealClearFoundation president David DesRosiers talks about the goals of the Samizdat Prize at the first annual award ceremony hosted by RCP (you can watch the full event here): DAVID DESROSIERS: We get the world that we praise. We get bad movies because the Oscars exist. We have a problem with...

Miranda Devine: 2020 Election Outcome Might Have Been Different If Intel Community Hadn't Lied About Hunter Biden's LaptopApril 03, 2024

New York Post reporter Miranda Devine, one of the winners of the first annual RCP Samizdat Prize for resisting censorship, said at an event last month hosted by RealClearPolitics that if her reporting on Hunter Biden's laptop had not been suppressed in the weeks ahead of the 2020 presidential...

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: Covid Mistakes Will Be Repeated If Lockdowns Are Not RepudiatedApril 05, 2024

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya warned at RCP''s first Samizdat Prize award ceremony last month that the mistakes of Covid-19 will be repeated if they are not completely repudiated: DR. JAY BHATTACHARYA: It will absolutely happen again, there will be another pandemic. The same playbook will come out...

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sponsored is labelled link to art eg AP ggl says does not violate polocy

August 15, 2024

05:01

CLIP

Matt Taibbi: This is 'diabolical' and 'raises all sorts of questions'

Investigative journalist Matt Taibbi says the Harris campaign rewriting headlines in ads on Google is 'confusing the reader' on 'The Story with Martha MacCallum.'

top line text we think is from AP [it’s not?]

ggl 2017 pjt owl skew to reliable src, traffic to alt media dropped

---

rci from racket

Three years ago, on February 25th, 2021, Aaron Maté at RealClearInvestigations ran “In Final Days, Trump Gave Up on Forcing Release of Russiagate Files, Nunes Prober Says.”Extensively quoting former Principal Deputy to the Acting Director of National Intelligence Kash Patel, Aaron wrote a section on “Assessing the ‘Intelligence Community Assessment,’” detailing a lot of the same story Michael Shellenberger, Alexandra Gutentag and I ran in Publicand RacketThursday.Describing a 2018 House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) report on the subject, Aaron wrote:

*The March 2018 House report found that the production of the ICA “deviated from established CIA practice.” And the core judgment that Putin sought to help Trump, the House report found, resulted from “significant intelligence tradecraft failings that undermine confidence in the ICA judgments.”

Many of us who followed this story — a number of reporters on both sides of the aisle did so obsessively — have long had a good idea about the general direction of that House investigation. The tale of improper CIA and FBI surveillance mixed with manufactured intelligence has been in the ether since late 2017 and early 2018.

I’ll list just a few of the names who reported stories in this direction over the years, in some cases day after day on broadcast shows. An attentive reader will notice nearly everyone on the list has been denounced at some point by the mainstream commentators who got this story horribly wrong. Aaron, considered a traitor by former mainstream colleagues, faced pressure from staff at The Nation,was denounced by The Guardianas part of a “network of conspiracy theorists,” and failed to gain support from any major media outlet or press advocacy organization when the FBI passed on an outrageous request from Ukrainian secret services to remove him from Twitter.

Others who got this story right but were singled out for dismissal or ridicule include:

former CIA officer Ray McGovern, who was called “fringe” and “conspiracy-mongering” by Max Boot, a member of the illustrious club of pundits who botched both the Steele dossier and Iraqi WMD stories;

former NYPD officer and Secret Service agent Dan Bongino, who has been on this subject for years and was called a “misinformation superspreader” by the New York Timesafter the 2020 election;

Interceptfounder Glenn Greenwald, denounced as a pathological bigot for dissenting on Trump-Russia themes, and ultimately forced out of his own publication for writing critically of Hunter Biden and Burisma without adequately addressing the question of “Russia’s hand”;

former CIA operative Larry Johnson, who said years ago that the surveillance campaign began with the GCHQ, Britain’s version of the NSA, in 2015 and was among the first to say publicly what our source just told us, that there is intelligence suggesting Maltese professor and supposed Russian asset Joseph Mifsud was British intelligence. He’s naturally been denounced as a “conspiracy theorist”;

Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo, declared “bonkers” by the Daily Beast, perhaps the most aggressive promoter of the “collusion” theory and one of the most dependable producers of factually dubious stories on this subject in the mainstream press landscape;

author Lee Smith, the major chronicler of the HPSCI work (more to come on this), who naturally was ripped for “conspiracy theory” for publishing a book on the subject;

Pulitzer-winner Jeff Gerth, who wrote a 24,000-word deconstruction of Trump-Russia coverage in the*Columbia Journalism Reviewthat included a quote from Bob Woodward saying the media needed to “walk down the painful road of introspection.” He was called a “Trump-Russia denialist” who “can’t handle the truth,” by David Corn of *Mother Jones, one of the first people to publish the phony Steele-blackmail story;

another RealClearwriter, Paul Sperry, who wrote about CIA chief John Brennan overruling dissent to create the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment. Sperry popped up in the Twitter Files when the office of California congressman Adam Schiff, who infamously said he had “more than circumstantial” evidence of collusion, asked to have Sperry banned;

Professor Margot Cleveland of The Federalistand Chuck Ross of the Daily Signal,who both got this right and were both marked “unreliable” by Pentagon-funded NewsGuard;

former The Hilland current JustTheNews writer John Solomon, who published a significant amount of the key documents in this matter, and was the subject of a poisonous media campaign that crested particularly during the period of the first Trump impeachment;

citizen investigators like the Racket-profiled “Sleuth’s Corner” of @Walkafyre, @TECHNO_FOG, @RyanM58699717, @climateaudit, @FOOL_NELSON, and @Hmmm57474203. This group who uncovered the name of the “primary sub-source” of famed British ex-spy Christopher Steele, Igor Danchenko, not only went roundly uncredited, but was immediately accused in the New York Timesof putting Danchenko “in Russia’s sights” by Virginia Senator Mark Warner.

There are countless others. Even I took more than one whack at this material in the past, among other things listing episodes involving illegal classified leaks as a way of focusing attention on intelligence abuses surrounding the Trump-Russia scandal. I heard the gist of this week’s story six years ago, but didn’t have the details and the multiple people willing to be sources I needed to put something in print. That changed when Michael, Alexandra, and Publicgot their scoop a few weeks ago.

Anyone can go back and read the reports of the figures listed above and piece together pretty much the whole story we ran this week, minus a few conspicuous details. We learned there were 26 surveillance targets among Trump’s aides and associates in the 2016 campaign year, and we were able to use a number of key quotes, including the internal intelligence community analysis that Russia wasn’t desperate to avoid a Hillary Clinton presidency at all, but saw her as “manageable and reflecting continuity” and a “relationship they were comfortable with.”

These details, along with things like the assertion that the surveillance had “nothing to do with our relationship with Russia” and was “just leveraging capabilities to undermine a rookie unprepared Trump campaign,” are important and move the story forward. The quotes about Russia’s attitude toward Hillary in particular could be impactful in helping undo one of the last surviving Russiagate myths.

Still, it’s important to make clear that the substance of these pieces was already out thanks to the people listed above, along with others (Joseph Wulfsohn? Rich Lowry? Caitlin Johnstone?) I may have neglected to mention. The novelty with our series is that headline-ready specifics from still-classified reports do not often get out in a way that’s reportable. And far from searching for credit, the goal in jumping on TV shows and podcasts and trying to make noise with these stories is to inspire or shame (either will do) other reporters to build on these articles, as we built on eight years of past reports.

A last note on the media angle. Amid the initial rush of Trump-Russia mania, a series of reports came out that featured tantalizing details. One was Jane Mayer’s March 2018 “Christopher Steele, The Man Behind the Dossier,” which told us about a “stream of illicit communications between Trump’s team and Moscow that had been intercepted” by the GCHQ. The New Yorkerpiece asserted GCHQ chief Robert Hannigan flew to Washington to brief John Brennan about these details. Brennan already co-signed that story in May of 2017, when he testified in Congress, saying he had been “aware of intelligence and information about contacts between Russian officials and U.S. persons that raised concerns” that those people “were cooperating with the Russians,” and that this “served as the basis for the FBI investigation to determine whether such collusion… occurred.” The Guardian’s“British Spies Were First to Spot Trump Team’s Links With Russia” also told this same basic story.

There’s considerable overlap between those accounts, the ones we just published, and the reports of the people listed above. In each place you find the elements of very early intercepts of Trump team conversations captured abroad. I think I speak for everyone on the above list when I say I’d be thrilled if Brennan or Hannigan or whoever would come forward and show us what those “illicit communications” were, or what that “intelligence… that raised concerns” was. If there’s proof all of this was legitimate, we all need to see it.

---

sadly just vid no text

rising bs

9467600

===

Exclusive | State Department tried to discredit reporters, Republican pol over conservative 'blacklist'

no lnx doc?

ny post

State Department tried to discredit reporters, Republican pol over conservative ‘blacklist’

By Josh Christenson

:{:{Published Sep. 13, 2024, }:

The State Department sought to denigrate two reporters and a member of Congress as part of damage control attempts over having helped fund an advertisers’ “blacklist” of The Post and other outlets allegedly spreading “misinformation,” according to internal documents.

In March 2023, the department distributed press guidance about how to counter bombshell reports by “Twitter Files” scribe Matt Taibbi and Washington Examiner investigative journalist Gabe Kaminsky concerning the State’s Global Engagement Center (GEC).

Taibbi’s first report about the GEC, in a lengthy Twitter thread published Jan. 3, 2023, revealed efforts to pressure US social media platforms early in the COVID-19 pandemic to censor Americans online, purportedly to counter “disinformation.”

Matt Taibbi discusses "Rolling Stone: Stories from the Edge" with the Build Series at Build Studio on October 31, 2017 in New York City.

The State Department distributed press guidance in March 2023 about how to counter recent bombshell reports by “Twitter Files” journalist Matt Taibbi.

FilmMagic

“We learned Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation ‘requests’ from every corner of government: the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at State, even the CIA,” Taibbi testified to Congress in March of that year.

Those moderation requests included flagging proponents of the so-called “lab leak theory,” despite distinguished virologists maintaining there was far more evidence for the accidental emission of COVID-19 from a lab in Wuhan, China than for natural transmission of the virus from animals to humans.

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Kaminsky also uncovered a $100,000 grant from GEC to the London-based Global Disinformation Index (GDI) in 2021 and 2022, an entity that calls itself “the world’s first rating of the media sites based on the risk of the outlet carrying disinformation.”

Secretary of State Antony Blinken delivers a statement on Russian intelligence operations at the U.S. State Department on September 13, 2024 in Washington, DC. The United States is accusing Russian news outlets, including RT, of working hand-in-hand with the Russian government to aid in their intelligence and international financing operations around the world. Blinken said, RT actively carries out covert operations not only in the United States, but also in several other countries at the direction of intelligence officials reporting directly to the Kremlin.

The Washington Examiner’s Gabe Kaminsky also uncovered a $100,000 from GEC to the London-based Global Disinformation Index (GDI) in 2021 and 2022.

Getty Images

Despite GEC’s mandate proclaiming that it is only involved in international affairs, GDI went on to concoct a blacklist of 10 outlets, including The Post, with conservative or libertarian-leaning opinion sections in an effort to demonetize them.

Ad associations further participated in GDI’s efforts to blacklist the media outlets, though some called the list “bewildering” for having “somehow placed the NYPost [sic] as ‘at most risk’ paper in the USA for disinformation.”

Both the GEC grant, distributed between October 2021 and March 2022, and another $756,923 government-funded grant from the National Endowment for Democracy to GDI, have not been renewed.

State Department documents

Other GEC grants went to non-governmental entities like the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab to flag social media posts for suppression.

Other GEC grants went to non-governmental entities like the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab to flag social media posts for suppression.

The State Department records, exclusively obtained by The Post, make no mention of these taxpayer-funded entities’ conduct, choosing instead to fault Taibbi, Kaminsky and now-X owner Elon Musk for spreading alleged falsehoods about GEC.

“Elon Musk’s retweet of Taibbi’s thread insinuates that the [US government], and the GEC in particular, pressured Twitter to close U.S. accounts of which the [US government] disapproved,” the guidance document reads. “The evidence offered for this claim is often missing, inferred, or presented out of context. The thread comes to no firm conclusion, and switches blame to the FBI near the end of the string.”

“I presented copious evidence and context in all the stories I wrote about GEC,” Taibbi told The Post, noting that the State Department publicly commented to CNN about having flagged 250,000 accounts to Twitter for allegedly spreading “disinformation.”

State Department document

The former head of Trust and Safety at Twitter, Yoel Roth, said that was one of the reasons their platform had been reluctant to do any work with GEC since it was engaged in “offensive influence” operations.

It also waves away Kaminsky’s series of reports on GEC by stating the reporter “did not ask for an interview,” while acknowledging he “sent questions repeatedly” to the State Department press office for information on the grant to GDI.

“The State Department had numerous opportunities to respond to my reporting on it funding the Global Disinformation Index, but they declined to answer basic questions,” Kaminsky told The Post, citing roughly a dozen requests for comment made between January and February 2023.

The talking points only quote from two lawmakers about GEC’s funding, Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) and Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), portraying the latter favorably by linking to a Twitter thread in which he claims the extensive reporting by Taibbi and Kaminsky was “MADE UP OUT OF THIN AIR.”

State Department document

Other guidance told press officers to respond: “The GEC does not and has never attempted to moderate content on social media platforms.”

Banks was quoted as having told a Russian state media outlet that he would seek to ban future funding for entities that stifle Americans’ free speech — but the citation was paraphrasing his original quote to Kaminsky.

The selection suggests that Banks’ defense of the First Amendment was being linked to Russian influence operations — and to downplay the thrust of the Washington Examiner reports.

“The State Department falsely claimed I was boosting Russian state propaganda because I called out their censorship of conservative Americans,” Banks told The Post in a statement. “They are proving my point. It’s UnAmerican and disgraceful.”

“The Department of State has been and continues to be responsive to dozens of reporters requests for comment and congressional inquiries,” a spokesperson told The Post. “The bottom line remains the same: the Global Engagement Center does not engage in censorship, and it is focused on countering foreign disinformation overseas, not on the domestic information environment.”

State Department document

The internal State Department document stipulates that there was “a more precise focus on [the People’s Republic of China] and Russian disinformation activities.

Earlier statements have also noted that “GEC’s work with GDI was limited to disinformation efforts in East Asia and Europe,” without providing details.

The internal State Department document stipulates that there was “a more precise focus on [the People’s Republic of China] and Russian disinformation activities.”

“We were dedicated to rooting out malign foreign interference no matter who it came from,” Roth testified to the House Judiciary Committee in February 2023, “and if we found that the American government was engaged in foreign malign interference, we’d be addressing that as well.”

A House Small Business Committee report released last week found that GEC also “has several issues in its recordkeeping and that there are not sufficient audit procedures in place to efficiently track its use of taxpayer dollars,” the Washington Examiner first reported.

Filed under Coronavirus disinformation matt taibbi russia state department twitter files 9/13/24

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ref

State Department skirted mandate funding 'censorship' groups: GOP

eXCLUSIVE — An office housed within the State Department is faulted in a new congressional report with flouting its mandate to thwart foreign disinformation through its funding of groups engaged in “censorship” against small businesses in the United States.

“This interim report outlines how government agencies are working with the private sector to ensure that certain businesses do not have a fair chance to compete online,” said Rep. Roger Williams (R-TX), who chairs the House Small Business Committee. “Even worse, this report uncovers how taxpayer dollars contributed to the censorship that picks winners and losers in the online marketplace.”

The 66-page report was prepared by investigators on the Republican-led House Small Business Committee. For over a year, the panel has sought sprawlingfunding records from the State Department’s Global Engagement Center on its programs fighting alleged disinformation and misinformation. That investigation began due to a series of Washington Examiner reports on the office bankrolling the Global Disinformation Index — a British group pressuring advertisers to defund right-of-center media outlets in the U.S.

The release of the report comes as the Global Engagement Center, which has an estimated budget of $61 million and a staff of 125, faces the potential to lose funding over GOP-led frustrations about its involvement with apparent domestic censorship groups. A provision through the annual State Department appropriations bill, which passed the House this summer and will be negotiated in the Senate, aims to ban future checks to the GEC. The office is also facing a lawsuit from conservative media outlets over the $100,000 the GEC sent to GDI and its support of a company called NewsGuard that rates the “misinformation” levels of news outlets.

Titled “Instruments and Casualties of the Censorship-Industrial Complex,” the House report argues the GEC promoted “tech start-ups and other small businesses in the disinformation detection space to private sector entities with domestic censorship capabilities.” Moreover, the report argues the National Endowment for Democracy, a State Department-funded nonprofit group that awarded hundreds of thousands of dollars to GDI, “violated its international restrictions by collaborating with fact-checking entities in assessing domestic press businesses’ admission to a credibility organization.”

Formed in 2016 by then-President Barack Obama, the GEC works closely with the Defense Department, Justice Department, Department of Homeland Security, and other agencies. Since 2019, the GEC’s Technology Engagement Division has regularly met with social media platforms, while the office awarded many direct and subaward grants to entities pushing U.S. fact-checking initiatives, the House report found.

These initiatives, the report said, demonstrated the ways in which the GEC skirted its international mandate. One such initiative was a secret group chat targeting conservatives over alleged “fake news,” the Washington Examiner confirmed.

‘#FakeNewsSci’

The GEC, according to documents cited in the report, recently awarded taxpayer dollars to the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, a London-based entity that delivered a subaward to the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. But the subaward “was used to convince international news outlets to join Poynter’s International Fact-Checking Network’s (IFCN) Code of Principles, which is a group of news and information organizations that abide by a certain set of qualities denoting journalistic standards,” the report found.

To implement this award, the GEC was apparently added to a private email list in which apparent censorship activists “critiqued applicants, including domestic businesses such as the Daily Caller and its fact-checking organization,” according to the House report and documents obtained by the Washington Examiner through public records requests.

Internal documents show that in the email list titled “#FakeNewsSci,” participants were also affiliated with the National Endowment for Democracy, Snopes, Poynter, Clemson University, and other entities. Kate Starbird, a professor at the University of Washington, has also participated in the listserv, according to documents obtained by the *Washington Examiner* through a public records request.

“I have no role with the email list Fake News SCI and I have only messaged it a few times, primarily to share our job postings,” Starbird told the Washington Examiner.

In one February 2021 email in the listserv, then-National Endowment for Democracy official Dean Jackson slammed the Daily Caller, noting, “I personally wouldn’t lend them the credibility.” He cited a link to an analysis article by writer Marlo Slayback titled “Public Schools Are Becoming Cesspools Of Woke Liberal Activism. What Happened?” Jackson also cited a link to a report in Snopes titled “Why Have So Many Daily Caller Writers Expressed White Supremacist Views?”

(Dean Jackson email, Feb. 22, 2021/Washington Examiner)

Jackson’s email, according to other records obtained by the Washington Examiner, came two days after a professor in the chat named Harith Alani said the Daily Caller “published several misinforming articles themselves.” An email signature for the Google group said, “All exchanges are to be treated as ‘off the record’ unless the member(s) in question explicitly agree otherwise.” Members, according to the email signature, “must be recommended by two other group members to be added to the group.”

Meanwhile, in a February 2021 email in the private chat, Snopes founder David Mikkelson asked about the outlet’s funding for its fact-checking arm and foundation. The Daily Caller News Foundation and the for-profit Daily Caller “are two separate organizations with different missions, goals and tax statuses,” and “there is no commingling of finances between the two organizations,” the DCNF charity says on its website.

“Check Your Fact is funded from the Daily Caller‘s newsroom budget, and the Daily Caller is funded by the Daily Caller News Foundation (DCNF),” Mikkelson said. “So where does the DCNF get its money from? Providing tax forms that merely document how much revenue the DCNF takes in does nothing to answer that question.”

(Snopes founder David Mikkelson, Feb. 22, 2021/Washington Examiner)

“One of the key requirements of IFCN certification is supposed to be transparency of funding,” Mikkelson wrote to the chat on Feb. 23, 2021, linking to an “About Us” page for the Daily Caller’s fact-checking arm. “If anyone can parse through this word salad and figure out who or what funds the Daily Caller’s fact-checking arm, I’d like to know.”

In the congressional report, the House Small Business Committee said it’s “not appropriate” for the GEC or the NED to “belong to a cohort that gatekeeps domestic press companies from belonging to a private credibility organization.”

(Snopes founder David Mikkelson, Feb. 23, 2023/Washington Examiner)

The panel’s report, which cites various stories by the Washington Examiner last year along with separate funding records to “disinformation” groups, includes an audit of the GEC. The audit section notes that the GEC “has several issues in its record keeping and that there are not sufficient audit procedures in place to efficiently track its use of taxpayer dollars.”

“Despite State’s claims that it conducts rigorous oversight of subawardees, the GEC’s records indicate that there are numerous subawardees for which State has little or no information,” the report said.

“No Federal funds should be used to grow companies whose operations are designed to demonetize and interfere with the domestic press,” the report continued. “Though the government is no longer in a relationship with NewsGuard or the GDI, the damage has already been done — they have already received the backing of the Federal government in hosting their products on the GEC’s Testbed and recommending them to its partners, using their services, and helping to grow their products.”

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Membership | House Committee on Small Business

Republican Members

Rep. Williams

Website Facebook Twitter

Rep. Roger Williams

Chairman

(TX-25)

Rep. Leutkemeyer

Website Facebook Twitter

Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer

Vice Chairman

(MO-03)

Rep. Stauber

Website Facebook Twitter

Rep. Pete Stauber

(MN-08)

Rep. Meuser

Website Facebook Twitter

Rep. Dan Meuser

(PA-09)

Rep. Van Duyne

Website Facebook Twitter

Rep. Beth Van Duyne

(TX-24)

Rep. Salazar

Website Facebook Twitter

Rep. Maria Salazar

(FL-27)

Rep. Mann

Website Facebook Twitter

Rep. Tracey Mann

(KS-01)

Rep. Ellzey

Website Facebook Twitter

Rep. Jake Ellzey

(TX-06)

Rep. Molinaro

Website Facebook Twitter

Rep. Marc Molinaro

(NY-19)

Rep. Alford

Website Facebook Twitter

Rep. Mark Alford

(MO-04)

Rep. Crane

Website Facebook Twitter

Rep. Eli Crane

(AZ-02)

Rep. Bean

Website Facebook Twitter

Rep. Aaron Bean

(FL-04)

Rep. Hunt

Website Facebook Twitter

Rep. Wesley Hunt

(TX-38)

Rep. LaLota

Website Facebook Twitter

Rep. Nick LaLota

(NY-01)

Rep. Maloy

Website Facebook Twitter

Rep. Celeste Maloy

(UT-02)

Democrat Committee Members can be found on the Minority Small Business Committee website.

---

no lnx

Committee on Small Business Releases Interim Staff Report on Investigation into Federally Funded Censorship of Small Domestic Businesses

Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Print this Page (https://smallbusiness.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=407072#) Share by Email (mailto:?subject=I%27d%20like%20to%20share%20a%20link%20with%20you!&body=https://smallbusiness.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=407072)

Washington, September 10, 2024

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, Congressman Roger Williams (TX-25), Chairman of the House Committee on Small Business, released an interim staff report on the Committee’s 14-month investigation into the Global Engagement Center (GEC). The Committee has been investigating the Federal funding and promotion of entities who interfere with the ability of small domestic businesses to compete online because of their lawful speech. Throughout the investigation, the U.S. Department of State (State) has repeatedly slow rolled Congressional document requests, disregarded prioritized information, and provided incomplete and inadequate document productions. Chairman Williams issued the following statement.

“For over a year, the Committee has been investigating how online censorship has been affecting American small businesses,”said Chairman Williams.“This interim report outlines how government agencies are working with the private sector to ensure that certain businesses do not have a fair chance to compete online. Even worse, this report uncovers how taxpayer dollars contributed to the censorship that picks winners and losers in the online marketplace. This Committee will continue investigating the Biden-Harris Administration to uncover the full extent of how taxpayer resources were used to suppress free enterprise.”

Read the full CIC Reporthere (https://smallbusiness.house.gov/UploadedFiles/House_Committee_on_Small_Business-CIC_Report_September_2024.pdf).

Background:

The House Committee on Small Business has been investigating the Federal funding and promotion of small entities who interfere with the ability of small domestic businesses to compete online because of their lawful speech, as well as tech start-ups and other small businesses with products used to surveil and ultimately suppress lawful speech. Throughout the 14-month investigation into the Global Engagement Center (GEC), the U.S. Department of State (State) has repeatedly slow rolled Congressional document requests, disregarded prioritized information, and provided incomplete and inadequate document productions.

The Committee first wrote to State about this investigation well over a year ago on June 7, 2023, but State failed to respond. The Committee wrote again July 24, 2023 to reiterate its requests, yet received only a partial production of documents six months later. While the Committee repeatedly made accommodations to the GEC, including extra time and scoped down requests, responses to subsequent requests remained inadequate. To date, only a fraction of requested documents have been provided.

Unfortunately, the Committee was left with no choice but to issue a subpoena to State and the GEC on June 13, 2024. Despite the fact the Committee has been requesting these documents for over 14 months, State said it would take approximately 21 months from the date of the subpoena to produce the documents in full. In light of the continued slow rolling by State, the Committee has released an interim staff report based on its findings from the relatively limited productions and other available information.

interim? no names?

~ newsgaurd?

report 66 pp

House-Committee-on-Small-Business-CIC-Report-September-2024

...The House Committee on Small Business (Committee or HCSB) is charged with investigating all “problems of all types of small business” under House Rule X. As part of this responsibility, the Committee is investigating the Federal funding and promotion of small entities who purposely interfere with the ability of small domestic businesses to compete online because of their lawful speech, as well as tech start-ups and other small businesses with products used to surveil and ultimately suppress lawful speech. Over the course of the Committee’s 14-month investigation, the Committee found:

Finding 1: The Federal government has fueled a censorship ecosystem impacting not only individuals’ First Amendment rights, but the ability of certain small businesses to compete online.

Finding 2: The Federal government has funded, developed, and promoted entities that aim to demonetize news and information outlets because of their lawful speech, impacting domestic businesses’ operations, reputation, customer reach, and revenue.

Finding 3: The Global Engagement Center (GEC), an interagency body housed within the U.S. Department of State (State), circumvented its strict international mandate by funding, developing, then promoting tech start-ups and other small businesses in the disinformation detection space to private sector entities with domestic censorship capabilities

. Finding 4: The National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a private non-profit funded almost entirely by Congressional appropriations, violated its international restrictions by collaborating with fact-checking entities in assessing domestic press businesses’ admission to a credibility organization. Throughout this investigation, the Committee obtained nonpublic GEC and NED award information for direct and indirect grant recipients. State repeatedly slow rolled Congressional document requests, disregarded prioritized information, and provided incomplete and inadequate productions.

This led the Committee to issue a subpoena on June 13, 2024. Despite the fact the Committee subpoenaed documents which it had been requesting for more than 14 months, State said it would take approximately 21 months from the date of the subpoena to produce these documents in full—around March 2026. In the absence of compliance with the subpoena, the Committee now remits this interim report on its present findings until such a time where the subpoenaed information is provided

...

164 Gabe Kaminsky, Disinformation Inc: Microsoft suspends relationship with group blacklisting conservative news, Wash. Examiner (Feb. 11, 2023). 165 Gabe Kaminsky, Disinformation Inc: Massive corporation Oracle severs ties with conservative blacklist group, The Wash. Examiner (

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RFK, Jr. and Motley MAGA, Anti-Vaxx Crew Descending on DC to ‘Rescue the Republic’

By Peter Montgomery | September 27, 2024 rww

Image from website promoting Rescue the Republic rally.

If there’s anything the MAGA movement loves, it’s a rally with a bunch of speakers who can be counted on to blend “anti-wokeness,” conspiracy theories, Christian nationalism, and hero-worship of Donald Trump.

The latest assemblage, traveling under the name of Rescue the Republic, will grace the National Mall in Washington, D.C. on Sunday, Sept. 29, with the stated mission of mobilizing Americans to save the republic and western civilization itself from “a conglomerate of industrial complexes.”

The speaker lineup includes Trump booster Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Sen. Ron Johnson, Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk, Moms for Liberty’s Tiffany Justice, Pizzagate promoter Jack Posobiec, Former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, anti-feminist public intellectual Jordan Peterson, anti-vaccine activist Del Bigtree, and journalist Matt Taibbi. Also speaking is #WalkAway founder Brandon Straka, who was sentenced to three years of probation for his role in inciting the mob that attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

A video promoting the event warns of shadowy forces manipulating world events. “Today the curtain has been pulled back to reveal the liars at the levers,” intones a narrator over images from the Wizard of Oz. “They are masters of deception, hell-bent to divide and conquer. Like magicians, they use the art of redirection to keep us distracted as they trick us. Nearly every war we have fought was initiated by their propaganda.”

“Everything we have fought for, everything we’ve earned, and everything we love is under attack,” the narrator says, “At what point do we say, enough is enough.’?”

Rescue the Republic claims to represent a “rebel alliance” of people “of every culture, creed, and ideology” who “are putting politics aside” to “secure peace and freedom.” Libertarian Party chair Angela McArdle is listed as a founder of the group, the latest iteration of a coalition of “COVID-19 dissidents” that rallied against vaccine requirements as “Defeat the Mandates.” They later organized a right-left coalition against U.S. aid to Ukraine under the banner, “Rage Against the War Machine,” which is holding a rally on Saturday.

We will have to see how many MAGA-movement speakers “put politics aside” on Sunday.

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GEC

RISING THE HILL

GLOBAL ENGAGEMENT CTR DEMONITZE

10066861

HSE COMM ON SMALL BIZ WA EXMR

RACKET NEWS

UNIC NGO ETC ALL GUBMINT REASOn MAG THREATEDED THEFEDERALIST pesruADE ADVERTS NO FUND; CHARGES HAVE NO MERIT, WITHDRAWN

GLOBAL DIsINFO INDEX uk fr ngo us $

gec state dept orig dod; foreign media storing? scoring info

dynamic exclusion list circulated to advertizers eg ggl; economic damage to am co;

gabe kaminski wa exr attempt to discredit, talk about past, lived in ussr unsavery actiivty on my part; sneak jm banks sneaky, talking pts how to respond, ria novesty fom wa exmr, shades of mccarthy

moderators at twitter state dept $ roth method shoddy russia bots wrong; caved bc cost too high not admit correct;

bo xo 2016

ctr terror al queada ISIS --> domsestic speech; twit rbi dni relations; twit let in dr content mod, but not new agy; yellow vest = moscow control info ecosys guilt by assoc, finally allowed gec in; shadow ban; algo skew woman;

corps rely on gov subsidy to exist [no evidence]

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matt rcp jan 2014

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2024/01/26/investigative_issues_is_the_electoral_fix_already_in_1008021.html

the fix is in. To “protect democracy,” democracy is already being canceled. We just haven’t admitted the implications of this to ourselves yet.}:

On Sunday, January 14th, NBC News ran an eye-catching story: “Fears grow that Trump will use the military in ‘dictatorial ways’ if he returns to the White House.” It described “a loose-knit network of public interest groups and lawmakers” that is “quietly” making plans to “foil any efforts to expand presidential power” on the part of Donald Trump.

The piece quoted an array of former high-ranking officials, all insisting Trump will misuse the Department of Defense to execute civilian political aims. Since Joe Biden’s team “leaked” a strategy memo in late December listing “Trump is an existential threat to democracy” as Campaign 2024’s central talking point, surrogates have worked overtime to insert existentialor democracyin quotes. This was no different:

“We’re about 30 seconds away from the Armageddon clock when it comes to democracy,” said Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Defense, William Cohen, adding that Trump is “a clear and present danger to our democracy.” Skye Perryman of Democracy Forward, one of the advocacy groups organizing the “loose” coalition, said, “We believe this is an existential moment for American democracy.” Declared former CIA and defense chief Leon Panetta: “Like any good dictator, he’s going to try to use the military to basically perform his will.”

Former Acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security at the U.S. Department of Justice and current visiting Georgetown law professor Mary McCord was one of the few coalition participants quoted by name. She said:

*We’re already starting to put together a team to think through the most damaging types of things that he [Trump] might do so that we’re ready to bring lawsuits if we have to.

The group was formed by at least two organizations that have been hyperactive in filing lawsuits against Trump and Trump-related figures over the years: the aforementioned Democracy Forward, chaired by former Perkins Coie and Hillary Clinton campaign attorney Marc Elias, and Protect Democracy, a ubiquitous non-profit run by a phalanx of former Obama administration lawyers like Ian Bassin, and funded at least in part by LinkedIn magnate Reid Hoffman.

The article implied a future Trump presidency will necessitate new forms of external control over the military. It cited Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal’s bill to “clarify” the Insurrection Act, a 1792 law that empowers the president to deploy the military to quell domestic rebellion. Blumenthal’s act would add a requirement that Congress or courts ratify presidential decisions to deploy the military at home, seeking essentially to attach a congressional breathalyzer to the presidential steering wheel.

NBC’s quotes from former high-ranking defense and intelligence officials about possible preemptive mutiny were interesting on their own. However, the really striking twist was that we’d read the story before.

Summer, 2020. The TIP media blitz.

For over a year, the Biden administration and its surrogates have dropped hint after hint that the plan for winning in 2024 — against Donald Trump or anyone else — might involve something other than voting. Lawsuits in multiple states have been filed to remove Trump from the ballot; primaries have been canceled or invalidated; an ominous Washington Posteditorial by Robert Kagan, husband to senior State official Victoria Nuland, read like an APB to assassins to head off an “inevitable” Trump dictatorship; and on January 11th of this year, leaders of a third party group called “No Labels” sent an amazing letter to the Department of Justice, complaining of a “conspiracy” to stop alternative votes.

Authored by former NAACP director Ben Chavis, former Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman, former Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, former North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory, and former Assistant U.S. Attorney and Iran-Contra Special Counsel Dan Webb, the No Labels letter described a meeting of multiple advocacy groups aligned with the Democratic party. In the 80-minute confab, audio of which was obtained by*Semafor,*a dire warning was issued to anyone considering a third-party run:

*Through every channel we have, to their donors, their friends, the press, everyone — everyone — should send the message: If you have one fingernail clipping of a skeleton in your closet, we will find it… If you think you were vetted when you ran for governor, you’re insane. That was nothing. We are going to come at you with every gun we can possibly find. We did not do that with Jill Stein or Gary Johnson, we should have, and we will not make that mistake again.

The Semaforpiece offered a rare glimpse into the Zoom-politics culture that’s dominated Washington since the arrival of Covid-19. If this is how Beltway insiders talk about how to keep Joe Lieberman or Ben Chavis out of politics, imagine what they say about Trump?

We don’t have to imagine. Three and a half years ago, in June and July of 2020, an almost exactly similar series of features to the recent NBC story began appearing in media, describing another “loose network” of “bipartisan officials,” also meeting “quietly” to war-game scenarios in case “Trump loses and insists he won,” as the Washington Postput it.

That group, which called itself the Transition Integrity Project (TIP), involved roughly 100 former officials, think-tankers, and journalists who gathered to “wargame” contested election scenarios. The “loose” network included big names like former Michigan governor and current Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, and former Hillary Clinton campaign chief John Podesta, who in his current role as special advisor to President Joe Biden overseeing the handout of roughly $370 billion in “clean energy” investments is one of the most powerful people in Washington.

The TIP was hyped like the rollout of a blockbuster horror flick: In a second Trump Term, No One Will Hear You Scream… Stories in NPR, the Financial Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Postand over a dozen other major outlets outlined apocalyptic predictions about Trump’s unwillingness to leave office, and how this would likely result in mass unrest, even bloodshed. A typical quote was from TIP co-founder, Georgetown law professor, and former Pentagon official Rosa Brooks, who told the*Boston Globe* that every one of the group’s simulations ended in chaos and violence, because “the law is... almost helpless against a president who’s willing to ignore it.”

Podesta played Joe Biden in one TIP simulation, and in one round refused to accede to a “clear Trump win,” threatening instead to seize a bloc of West Coast states including California (absurdly dubbed “Cascadia”) and secede. Podesta’s “frankly ridiculous move,” as one TIP participant described it, was so over the top that a player leaked it to media writer Ben Smith of the New York Times.

The latter in Timesianfashion stuck the seeming front-page tale near the bottom of an otherwise breezy August 2nd story titled, called “How The Media Could Get the Election Story Wrong”:

*A group of former top government officials called the Transition Integrity Project actually gamed four possible scenarios, including one that doesn’t look that different from 2016: a big popular win for Mr. Biden, and a narrow electoral defeat… They cast John Podesta, who was Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, in the role of Mr. Biden. They expected him, when the votes came in, to concede...

But Mr. Podesta… shocked the organizers… he persuaded the governors of Wisconsin and Michigan to send pro-Biden electors to the Electoral College. In that scenario,* *California, Oregon, and Washington then threatened to secede from the United States if Mr. Trump took office…}:

News that Hillary Clinton’s former campaign chief rejected a legal election result, even in a hypothetical simulation, was obvious catnip to conservative media, which took about ten minutes to repackage Smith’s story using the same alarmist headline format marking earlier TIP write-ups. Breitbartpublished “Democrats’ ‘War Game’ for Election Includes West Coast Secession, Possible Civil War,” and a cascade of further red-state freakouts seemed inevitable.

“At that point,” says Nils Gilman, COO and EVP of Programs at the Berggruen Institute think tank, who served alongside Brooks as TIP’s other co-founder, “we decided we needed to be out about having run this exercise, to prevent the allegation that this was a ‘shadowy cabal’ — not that that narrative didn’t take hold anyways.”

The final TIP report was released the next day, August 3rd, 2020. Titled “Preventing a Disrupted Presidential Election and Transition,” the full text was, as any person attempting an objective read will grasp, sensational.

The Podesta episode was worse than reported, with the secession proposal coming on “advice from President Obama,” used as leverage to a) secure statehood for Washington, DC and Puerto Rico b) divide California into five states to increase its Senate representation, and c) “eliminate the Electoral College,” among other things. TIP authors also warned Trump’s behavior could “push other actors, including, potentially, some in the Democratic Party, to similarly engage in practices that depart from traditional rule of law norms, out of perceived self-defense.”

More tellingly, there were multiple passages on the subject of abiding by and/or trusting in the law, and how this can be a weakness. TIP authors concluded that “as an incumbent unbounded by norms, President Trump has a huge advantage” in the upcoming election, and chided participants that “planners need to take seriously the notion that this may well be a street fight, not a legal battle.” They added the key observation that “a reliance on elites observing norms are [sic] not the answer here.”

Asked about that passage, Gilman replied that it was “the right question,” i.e. “Why can’t we just rely on elites to observe/enforce norms?” Noting that two-thirds of the GOP caucus voted not to certify the 2020 election, he went on: “If I had had total confidence in the solidity of the institutions, I wouldn’t have felt the need to run the exercises.”

This answer makes some sense in the abstract, but ignores the years-long campaign of norm-breaking in the other direction leading up to the TIP simulation. In the eight-plus years since Donald Trump entered the national political scene, we’ve seen the same cast of characters appear and reappear in dirty tricks schemes, many of which began before he was even elected (more on that below). The last time we encountered this “loose-knit group” story, the usual suspects were all there, and the public by lucky accident of the Smith leak gained detailed access to Democratic Party thinking about how to steal an election — if necessary, of course, to “protect the democratic process.”

That incident acquires new significance now in light not only of this NBC story, but also the dismal 2024 poll numbers for Biden, a host of unusually candid calls for preemptive action to prevent Trump from taking office, the bold efforts to remove Trump from the ballot in states like Colorado and Maine, and those lesser-publicized, but equally important campaign to keep third party challengers like No Labels or Robert F. Kennedy from gaining ballot access in key states.

The grim reality of Campaign 2024 is that both sides appear convinced the other will violate “norms” first, with Democrats in particular seeming to believe extreme advance action is needed to head off a Trump dictatorship. Such elevated levels of paranoia virtually guarantee that someone is going to cheat before Election Day in November, at which point the court of public opinion will come into play. The key question will be, who abandoned democracy first?

The TIP report provided an answer. It contained long lists of theoretical Trump abuses that sounded suspiciously more like the extralegal maneuvers already deployed against Trump dating back to mid-2016, particularly during the failed effort to prosecute him for collusion with Russia. Interpreted by some as a literal plan to overturn a legal Trump victory, its greater significance was as a historical document, since it read like a year-by-year synopsis of all the home team rule-breaking. In other words, the TIP read like a Team Clinton playbook, only with hero and villain reversed.

Bearing in mind that many of the people involved were also Russiagate actors, here’s a abbreviated list of abuses the TIP authors supposedly feared Trump would commit:

*“The President’s ability… to launch investigations into opponents; and his ability to use Department of Justice and/or the intelligence agencies to cast doubt on election results or discredit his opponents.”

It’s true a president so inclined can do these things, and possible a re-elected Trump might, but they were clearly done first to Trump in this case. The FBI’s road-to-nowhere Crossfire Hurricane probe of Russian collusion, which made use of illegally obtained FISA surveillance authority, began on July 31, 2016. Trump opponents have been “launching investigations” really without interruption ever since, with many (including especially the recent Frankensteinian hush-money prosecution) obviously politicized.

Likewise, the office of the Director of National Intelligence published an Intelligence Community Assessment in early January 2017, again before Trump’s inauguration, that used information from the bogus Steele dossier to conclude that “Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances.” If that isn’t using intelligence agencies to “cast doubt on election results,” what is? Worse, the trick would be repeated, over and over:

“The President and key members of his administration can also reference classified documents without releasing them, manipulate classified information, or selectively release classified documents for political purposes, fueling manufactured rumors.”

:{:{This phenomenon also began before Trump’s election, notably with the story leaked on January 10, 2017, about four “intel chiefs,” including FBI Director James Comey, who presented then-President-elect Trump with “claims of Russian efforts to compromise him,” including the infamous pee tape. }:

“Selective” release of “classified documents” then continued through the Trump presidency. Other incidents involved the “repeated contacts with Russian intelligence” story (February 2017), a *Washington Post*story about Jeff Sessions speaking to the Russian ambassador (March 2017), the (incorrect) story about Trump lawyer Michael Cohen being in Prague (April 2018), the infamous “Russian bounty” story (June 2020), and many, many, others.}:

Podesta himself participated in one of the first and most damaging “manufactured rumor” episodes, beginning in late 2016, involving the use of the Elias-commissioned Steele dossier to illegally obtain a FISA warrant on former Trump aide Carter Page. Podesta, who of course knew the real source of the story, reacted to it as if it was news generated by government investigators and publicly derided Page as a Russian cutout, before adding that the 2016 election “was distorted by the Russian intervention.” This was a textbook example of using “manufactured rumors” from intelligence agencies to “cast doubt” on election results as you’ll find.

*“Additional presidential powers subject to misuse include… his ability to restrict internet communications in the name of national security.”

As for restricting internet communications “in the name of national security,” Racketpauses to laugh. The growth of state-aided censorship initiatives like the ones we studied all last year in the Twitter Files began well before Trump’s election, for instance with the creation in Barack Obama’s last year of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, which later worked with Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership to focus heavily on posts deemed to be attempts at “delegitimization” in the 2020 election. Stanford’s group even flagged a story about the TIP in its final report as “conspiracy theory.”

Not to say that these bureaucracies couldn’t be abused by a second Trump administration, but so far they’ve been a near-exclusive fixation of Democratic politicians and security officials. There’s a reason Joe Biden is the only candidate slated to enjoy a censorship-free campaign season, while Trump and third-party challenger Robert F. Kennedy have been repeatedly removed or de-amplified from various platforms.

“There is considerable room to use foreign interference, real or invented, as a pretext to cast doubt on the election results or more generally to create uncertainty about the legitimacy of the election.”}:

This may have been the most amazing line in the TIP report, given that the entire Trump presidency was marked by stories like “How Russia Helped Swing the Election for Trump” (New Yorker) “Did Russia Affect the 2016 Election? It’s Now Undeniable” (Wired), “Russia ‘turned’ election for Trump, Clapper believes” (PBS), “Yes, Russian Election Sabotage Helped Trump Win” (Bloomberg), and a personal favorite, “CIA Director Wrongly Says U.S. Found Russia Didn't Affect Election Result” (NBC). There was so much “Russia hacked the election” messaging between 2016 and 2020, in fact, that our Matt Orfalea made two movies about it. Here’s one:

Democrats' "Stolen" Election Claims | FLASHBACK

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Watch on

In the 2018 midterm elections, officials warned that Russia was going to “attack” the congressional vote. Stories like “U.S. 2018 elections ‘under attack’ by Russia” (Reuters) and “Justice Dept. Accuses Russians of Interfering in Midterm Elections” (New York Times)were constants, until the Democrats retook the House in a “blue wave,” at which point headlines began saying the opposite (“Russians Tried, but Were Unable to Compromise Midterm Elections, U.S. Says” from theTimeswas a typical take). The TIP was written during a repeat version, as stories like “Lawmakers are Warned that Russia is Meddling to Re-Elect Trump” (New York Times) were near-daily fixtures in 2020 pre-election coverage. After Biden won, headlines like “Putin Failed to Mount Major Election Interference Activities in 2020” again became fixtures in papers like the Washington Post.

This brings us to the last and most controversial angle on the TIP report. When the original TIP text came out, Michael Brendan Daugherty in National Reviewwrote in an offhand tone that he got the feeling “some progressives are steeling themselves for a Color Revolution in the United States,” because winning a normal election “just isn’t cathartic enough.”

To this day, the color revolution idea makes TIP organizers laugh.

“The idea that some rando in Los Angeles,” Gilman says, referring to himself, “was secretly planning a color revolution (which he published a report about months in advance, which you gotta admit is a pretty weird move for a guy allegedly plotting a revolution) is a textbook example of Hofstadter’s Paranoid Style.”

Brooks is also incredulous, saying the color revolution thesis is a “profound misunderstanding” of the TIP report. “They aren’t plans or predictions, they’re efforts to understand how things might play out,” she wrote, adding that the TIP participants were merely asking, “What could go wrong?”

They may have asked that. Still, the group’s final report contained a string of references to “plans and predictions,” with entries like “Plan for a contested election,” “Plan for large-scale protests,” and “Make plans now for how to respond in the event of a crisis.” As for the “profound misunderstanding,” Brooks gave a friendly interview to a New York Timeswriter who was apparently laboring under the same “profound” delusion.

Weeks after the National Reviewpiece, Michelle Goldberg in the Timeswrote of Daugherty: “He’s right, but not in the way he thinks.” She explained that Democrats don’t relish the thought of an uprising, but look upon it as something to be dreaded, that “must nonetheless be considered.”

note base motive, egghead]

She then quoted Brooks. The Georgetown professor, who in her most recent book about life in the Defense Department described getting “a coveted intelligence community ‘blue badge’” to pass into “the sacred precincts of the CIA,” told Goldberg that in the event of a Trump power grab, “the only thing left is what pro-democracy movements and human rights movements around the world have always done, which is sustained, mass peaceful demonstrations.”

That did sound like a description of the Eastern European color revolutions, which generally involved mass street actions, sustained negative press pressure, and calls by NGOs and outside countries for the disfavored leader to step down. A major reason the “color revolution” theme struck commentators in connection with TIP had to do with the presence in the TIP simulation of Barack Obama’s former chief ethics lawyer, Norm Eisen. Eisen wrote a manual called The Democracy Playbookfor the Brookings Institution that is often referred to as the unofficial how-to guide for America-backed regime-change operations abroad. Anyone who’s been forced to read a lot of “democracy promotion” literature, as I had to in Russia, will recognize familiar themes in the TIP report.

One of the controversial features of “color revolution” episodes is that the U.S. has at times supported ousters of perhaps unsavory, but legally elected, leaders. Was the TIP group contemplating the “sustained” protest scenario only in the event of Trump stealing an election, or if he merely won in an unpleasant way, i.e. via the Electoral College with a popular vote deficit? Brooks at first indicated she didn’t understand the reference.

“I am not sure what the question is?” she wrote. “Peaceful protests, mass or otherwise, are constitutionally protected.”

I referred back to the Timespiece and the “movements around the world” quote, noting that while those outcomes might arguably have been desirable, it’d be hard to call them strictly democratic.

“I am not an expert on the color revolutions,” she replied. “It is certainly true that on both left and right, in both the US and abroad, there are nearly always... I guess I’d say spoilers, or violence entrepreneurs — who try to hijack peaceful protest movements.”

Lastly: one TIP simulation also predicted, with something like remarkable anti-clairvoyance, that Trump would contrive to label Biden supporters guilty of “insurrection” for protesting a “clear Trump win”:

The Trump Campaign planted agent provocateurs into the protests throughout the country to ensure these protests turned violent and helped further the narrative of a violent insurrection against a lawfully elected president.

That passage was published on August 3, 2020, long before most Americans knew or cared that the word “insurrection” had political significance. We’d be instructed in its use within hours of the riots, when Joe Biden said, “It’s not protest. It’s insurrection,” and everyone from Mitt Romney to Mitch McConnell to media talking heads to the authors of the articles of impeachment like Jamie Raskin fixated on the word. Still, not until December 2021 did a public figure explain how the 14th Amendment might be deployed strategically in the post-January 6th world. The insight came from Elias, who has since deleted the tweet:

We’re of course now seeing that litigation, notably in the form of a Colorado Supreme Court decision to remove Trump from the ballot, which was handed down after complaints filed citing the 14th Amendment provision alluded to by Elias.

All this is laid out as background for the coming nine months of campaign chaos, if we even end up having a traditional campaign season. Revolt of the Publicauthor and former CIA analyst Martin Gurri summed up the situation in a piece for The Free Presstitled “Trump. Again. The Question is Why?” The money quotes:

{The malady now exposed is this: the elites have lost faith in representative democracy. To smash the nightmare image of themselves that Trump evokes, they are willing to twist and force our system until it breaks… The implications are clear. Not only Trump, but the nearly 75 million Americans who voted for him, must be silenced and crushed. To save democracy, it must be modified by a possessive: “our democracy.”*}:

The Biden campaign, stuck in a seemingly irreversible poll freefall, has put all its rhetorical chips on the theme of “protecting democracy.” Biden mentions Trump’s “assault on democracy” at every opportunity, and even recently resorted to Apollo Creed-style imagery, campaigning at Valley Forge flanked by a dozen American flags and red, white, and blue lights. (Red-and-white striped trunks can’t be far off.) The DNC’s daily “talkers” memos for months have asked blue-party pols and friendly reporters to stress “the existential threat to freedom and democracy that Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans represent,” while pointing to stories like Vanity Fair’s, “There Is No ‘Both Sides’ to Donald Trump’s Threat to Democracy,” in its CONTENT TO AMPLIFY section.

The DNC’s “talkers” mailers

This messaging would likely have worked after January 6th, when Trump’s post-electoral conduct rankled voters, as evidenced by an exit approval rating of 34%. It can’t now, since the word “democracy” has been appropriated to refer exclusively to the party that declared its New Hampshire primary “non-binding” and “meaningless,” canceled its Florida primary, is preparing mass technical challenges against third-party challengers like No Labels or Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (and has a rich history in that area; see accompanying *Nader*piece), is seeking to kick the GOP front-runner off the ballot, has mass-filed bar complaints against attorneys who represented that candidate, and has piled criminal counts atop its main electoral opposition.

Many who couldn’t stand Trump, would never vote for him, and have been willing consumers of the awesome amount of propaganda published on the Trump subject, now need to face the fact that they’ve been had. Transformed into the avatar of all bad things — a crude domestic combo platter of Saddam, Milosevic, Assad, and Putin — this vision of the über-villain, Trump, has been used to distract mass audiences from the erosion of “norms” at home. “Protecting democracy” in the Trump context will be remembered as having served the same purpose as Saddam’s mythical WMDs, the shots fired in the Gulf of Tonkin, or Gaddafi’s fictional Viagra-enhanced army. Those were carefully crafted political lies, used to rally the public behind illegal campaigns of preemption.

Voters, by voting, “protect democracy.” A politician who claims to be doing the job for us is up to something. The group in the current White House is trying to steal for themselves a word that belongs to you. Don’t let them.

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note no names

Federal judge Aileen Cannon dismissed Jack Smith's classified-documents case against Trump.REUTERS

Legal take: Hey, Jack Smith — You’re Fired!

:{:{Monday, “special counsel Jack Smith heard the line Donald Trump made famous in ‘The Apprentice’: You’re fired!” quips The Wall Street Journal’s William McGurn. The line was from federal judge Aileen Cannon, as she dismissed Smith’s classified-documents case against Trump. Cannon ruled that no statute authorizes Smith’s appointment, nor was he confirmed by the Senate. As Justice Clarence Thomas has noted, this is no “trifling technicality.” }:

The need for a statute and for the Senate’s “advice and consent” stems from the Constitution’s Appointments Clause, a reaction to the Founders’ experience with the British monarchy. Cannon’s dismissal of the case, notes McGurn, is a “win” for Trump. But if she and Thomas are right, “it’s a bigger victory for the Constitution, the American people and all future presidents.”}:

From the left: Welcome to a ‘New Political Era’

:{:{After “the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, a series of reversals may mark the beginning of a new political era,” marvels Matt Taibbi at Racket News. The White House OK’d Secret Service protection for RFK Jr., essentially admitting it had previously been denied “for political reasons” or “spite.”}:

MSNBC pulled “Morning Joe,” an admission the show’s “format only holds up under something less than maximum scrutiny.” Meta lifted restrictions of Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts. Dems’ lawfare games are failing.

And Axios quoted a “senior House Democrat” saying, “We’ve all resigned ourselves to a second Trump presidency.” All this might signal the “collapse” of the notion Trump is such an “existential” threat he can’t be treated as any other politician. “We appear headed for a new world.”}:

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david corn

The Trump-Russia Denialists Are Back

By David Corn June 4, 2024

President Donald Trump laughing it up with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, left, and Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak at the White House on May 10, 2017. Russian Foreign Ministry Photo via AP

For years, I’ve been wondering why a handful of former lefty journalists—among them Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi—keep insisting that all talk of Russia’s attacks on the last two US presidential elections is a hoax concocted by hysterical liberals in league with the Deep State. We’ve seen evidence of Vladimir Putin’s clandestine information war with our eyes (such as Moscow’s 2016 hack-and-leak operation that boosted Donald Trump), and numerous investigations, government agencies, indictments, and bipartisan congressional reports have provided details about the Kremlin’s efforts to help Trump and damage the prospects of Hillary Clinton and, then, Joe Biden. Yet these dead-enders stick to the line that none of this happened and pooh-pooh any mention of current Russian disinformation efforts targeting US politics.

:{:{Why do they keep echoing Putin’s own dishonest denials? Do they despise Democrats or the intelligence community so much that they are reluctant to legitimize their concerns about Russian assaults on the United States? Are they blinded by their own-the-libs anti-anti-Trumpism that they refuse to give any credence to Trump’s opponents? Do they so loathe foreign policy hawks and neocons or so fear a new Cold War that they lie about Russia’s malfeasance to deny its critics any ammunition to deploy against Moscow?}:

Do they see Vladimir Putin and Russia, the enemy of their enemy, as an ally or at least a useful check on US and Western power? Do they believe that any acknowledgement of Russian disinformation operations would undercut their own crusade against tech companies, liberals, academia, the intelligence community, and the media, which they feverishly (and, to my mind, absurdly) portray as a unified and diabolical censorship industrial complex? One could believe in this dark theory and still recognize that Putin is a bad-faith actor mounting cyber-plots against the West. Yet Greenwald, for instance, legitimizes Tucker Carlson, a documented liar and disinformationist (and Putin softie), and excoriates anyone who points to Russian information ops as a threat to the United States. Like me.}:

With Russian information warfare against the United States underway and perhaps intensifying as the presidential contest approaches E-Day, Putin’s intervention to boost Trump and the efforts to deny this could become a factor in a close race.

After I recently wrote a piece on Moscow’s current attempts to influence the Trump-Biden rematch, Greenwald weighed in on Twitter (a.k.a. X):

Hide your wife, hide your kids! The Russkies "are coming again" -- to get the Democrats again! So says the DNC activist masquerading as a reporter who became very wealthy by first introducing the Steele Dossier hoax into our politics.

:{:{Greenwald is very talented when it comes to dolloping out derision. Of course, he did not engage with—let alone refute—any of the facts in my article, which referenced government and journalistic sources reporting on the Kremlin’s ongoing operations aimed at the United States. Instead, he resorted to his and the Trump crowd’s go-to deflection: the Steele memos. I was indeed the first journalist to report on their existence, though I did not publish them.}:

And whatever issues there were with their accuracy—they were never meant to be publicly released—these documents written by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele have no bearing on what did transpire during the 2016 election: documented Russian interference that aided Trump. The Steele memos, which, contrary to Trump’s rants and far-right talking points, did not trigger the FBI’s Trump-Russia inquiry, are a handy target for those who cannot handle the truth. And I’m pretty sure if you ask anyone at the Democratic National Committee, no one will say they consider me a DNC activist. Greenwald hides behind insults and lies.}:

In my response to his online missive, I tried to stick to the substance and asked Greenwald for his help, as I tried to puzzle out his stance:

So I guess Greenwald’s still sticking with the Putin-and-Trump disinformation line that there was no Russian attack on the 2016 election. No Democratic emails hacked and leaked, right? Why does he deny reality? There must be a reason.

Twitter

No surprise, Greenwald did not respond to this. But his sidekick Taibbi did:

David, he’s referring to one of the biggest hoaxes in the recent history of journalism, the Steele dossier, which you played a lead role in introducing. Glenn didn’t screw up—you did. And you still haven’t admitted it.

Once again, you can see the seams. Focus on the Steele memos, not the bigger and more consequential issue of Putin’s sabotage campaign against the 2016 election that helped Trump reach the White House, let alone the aiding-and-abetting role Trump played by relentlessly and falsely denying such an operation was underway.

Responding to Taibbi, I tried to be more explicit:

Answer a simple question I have asked you before: Did Russia intervene in the 2016 election to hurt Clinton and help Trump? Extra points if you answer this one: Did Trump aid & abet that operation by denying it was happening?

Twitter

Crickets.

:{:{Which brings me to where I began. Greenwald, Taibbi, and their ilk cannot engage in an honest dialogue about Russia and the 2016 election, or the 2020 election, in which Russian agents tried to smear Biden, or the current presidential election. Given that they refuse to concede that Putin did help Trump win the White House and strived to keep him there, they likely will not acknowledge that Russia-linked operations are currently occurring to exacerbate political divide in the US and assist Trump and will probably ratchet up in the months ahead.}:

This week, the New York Times reported that someone created a deepfake showing State Department spokesman Matt Miller seeming to suggest Russian targets for a Ukraine attack. Was Moscow behind this move? That seems a good bet—or a pro-Kremlin actor. Russian media outlets and websites disseminated the forgery to inflame anti-American sentiment and boost Putin’s propaganda that the United States is propelling the Ukraine war. It seems obvious this sort of operation could be trained against the US election.}:

Why don’t Greenwald and Taibbi care about Russian assaults on US politics? I remain flummoxed. These dead-enders certainly are free to assail the Steele memos, which were inaccurate on key points but raised the important and largely unknown matter of Russian interference, and even criticize my reporting on them (though my main point at the time was that the FBI was investigating Steele’s allegations as part of a Trump-Russia inquiry not yet made public). Yet why fixate on that and refuse to deal with the bigger picture of the Kremlin’s war on America? I’m sorry I cannot provide you an explanation. I’m sure it’s a doozy.

Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland@motherjones.com.

===

---

Over the last few weeks, Rolling Stone star journalist and Substacker Matt Taibbi has been one of the loudest voices insisting that warnings of Russian aggression against Ukraine were mainly dishonest hype and that such an invasion was extremely unlikely.

But then, Russia went and invaded Ukraine on Wednesday night. And on Thursday, Taibbi wrote a mea culpa for his substack readers, admitting he got the whole thing wrong and apologizing.

“Part of news and even commentary is admitting mistakes, and though I always made sure when discussing the subject to note Vladimir Putin could still invade Ukraine, I have to admit, I didn’t see this happening. Some old colleagues I trust, including some Putin-critical Russians, didn’t see it, either, but in many cases they just didn’t want to believe it, for reasons that are more understandable from their perspective,” Tabbi wrote.

“My mistake was more like reverse chauvinism, being so fixated on Western misbehavior that I didn’t bother to take this possibility seriously enough. To readers who trust me not to make those misjudgments, I’m sorry,” he continued. “Obviously, Putin’s invasion will have horrific consequences for years to come and massively destabilize the world.”

“I fear there will be more to say soon, but I’ll leave it at that for today. When you’re wrong, you’re wrong, and I was wrong about this,” Taibbi concluded.

Previously Taibbi had dismissed warnings of an imminent invasion as “information warfare,” and responded to critics by calling warnings “baseless” and “a big international PR win” for Putin.

---

9 24

[### Matt Taibbi - Coverage of the Russia-Ukraine Conflict Has ...

YouTube · Liberty Vault

9.6K+ views · 2 months ago](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-dpevVa4Xo)

Matt Taibbi explains why he believes coverage of the Russia-Ukraine conflict has been terrible. Buy my book, Thomas Paine: A Lifetime of ...

[### Creating a Russian Bogeyman

Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft

https://quincyinst.org › ... › Foreign Policy](https://quincyinst.org/2023/01/23/creating-a-russian-bogeyman/)

Jan 23, 2023 — The social media giant to heel while setting up the Russian bogeyman that haunts US foreign policy and posturing in the Ukraine war today.

Creating a Russian Bogeyman

Kelley Beaucar Vlahos

Posted onJanuary 23, 2023

One of the most damning facts to emerge from Matt Taibbi’s “Twitter Files” is how aggressive congressional lawmakers and federal agency officials were in pushing a cynical narrative that brought the social media giant to heel while setting up the Russian bogeyman that haunts U.S. foreign policy and posturing in the Ukraine war today.

Among many other acts of narrative and discourse manipulation, the “Twitter Files”—Twitter emails released to Taibbi and other journalists in the wake of Elon Musk’s October takeover of the company—show that beginning in 2017, Facebook and Twitter were under extraordinary pressure to acknowledge and publicize Russian meddling on their social media platforms throughout the 2016 election.

According to the narrative, the meddling—which supposedly came in the form of “bots” and accounts linked to the Russian government—was designed to help elect Donald Trump and polarize the American public. The pressure to expose and eliminate future threats of this nature led over the next three years to the formal insertion of the FBI, DHS, intelligence community, and State Department into Twitter’s daily moderation activities, right up to the eve of Trump’s loss in the 2020 election.

It can be argued that the Russian “malign influence” story helped to get the public’s buy-in for a new Cold War with Russia by normalizing the idea that Russians not only helped to elect Donald Trump, but were actively trying “to destroy U.S. democracy” and are still doing so. “It became conventional wisdom that Russia wants not just to compete with the United States, but to destroy us—to divide our society from within, to cripple our democracy,” said George Beebe, a former chief of the CIA’s Russia analysis and author of The Russia Trap: How Our Shadow War with Russia Could Spiral into Nuclear Catastrophe (2019).

Read the full piece in The American Conservative.

[### Why Is the FBI helping Ukraine Shut Up Americans?

National Review

https://www.nationalreview.com › corner › why-is-the-f...](https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/why-is-the-fbi-helping-ukraine-shut-up-americans/)

Jul 12, 2023 — Our FBI is assisting Ukraine's security service in censoring American citizens expressing their political views on American-founded tech platforms.

[### Matt Taibbi: Give War A Chance

ScheerPost

https://scheerpost.com › 2022/04/12 › matt-taibbi-give-...](https://scheerpost.com/2022/04/12/matt-taibbi-give-war-a-chance/)

Apr 12, 2022 — Matt Taibbi, author of the New York Times bestsellers The Divide, Griftopia, and The Great Derangement, is a contributing editor for Rolling Stone.

[### The Trump-Russia Denialists Are Back

Mother Jones

https://link.motherjones.com › public](https://link.motherjones.com/public/35592388)

Jun 4, 2024 — Greenwald, Taibbi, and their ilk cannot engage in an honest dialogue about Russia and the 2016 election, or the 2020 election, in which Russian ...

[### Putin, Ukraine and Tinkerbell | Ukraine, journalist | In my ...

Facebook · Russell Brand

580+ reactions · 2 years ago](https://www.facebook.com/RussellBrand/videos/putin-ukraine-and-tinkerbell/798644097958023/)

[

1:03](https://www.facebook.com/RussellBrand/videos/putin-ukraine-and-tinkerbell/798644097958023/)

In my recent conversation with journalist Matt Taibbi I spoke about Putin, Ukraine and Tinkerbell. Watch it in full & make sense of it all.

[### Matt Taibbi and John McWhorter – What Is Putin Thinking?

Apple

https://podcasts.apple.com › podcast › matt-taibbi-and-j...](https://podcasts.apple.com/fi/podcast/matt-taibbi-and-john-mcwhorter-what-is-putin-thinking/id505824976?i=1000557357233)

Mar 21, 2022 — Like many journalists and experts, Matt had been confident that Putin would not invade Ukraine. Unlike many journalists and experts, he issued ...

[### The Goals and Beneficiaries of the US Proxy War with Russia

YouTube · Liberty Vault

4K+ views · 4 months ago](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BH2E9rvW3Y)

Jordan Peterson and Matt Taibbi discuss the goals and beneficiaries of the US proxy war with Russia in Ukraine. Buy my book, Thomas Paine: A ...

[### Creating a Russian Bogeyman

RealClearDefense

https://www.realcleardefense.com › 2023/01/25 › creatin...](https://www.realcleardefense.com/2023/01/25/creating_a_russian_bogeyman_877678.html)

Jan 25, 2023 — Setting up the Russian bogeyman that haunts US foreign policy and posturing in the Ukraine war today.

Twitter Results

### Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi)

===

NO LNX NY MAG INTELLIGENCER? OCT 2021 ROSS BARKAN

What Happened to Matt Taibbi?

Obviously, I’m anxious about why I’m being profiled,” Matt Taibbi said at the end of our phone call this summer, which had already lasted an hour and a half. He was on vacation with his family. The day before, they went on a whale watch. “One thing that’s a little irksome, again, in my actual personal life, I could not be more the opposite of that …”

That could be, if you’ve read Taibbi over the last quarter-century, loaded with possibility: the acidic brilliance or the antic humor or, more recently, the savage scorn he has shown for “cancel culture.” There is a public Taibbi and a private Taibbi, and the more you speak with him and others who know him, the more you begin to understand the difference. The public self is not a lie or a performance — it’s just, in private, Taibbi is not going to punch you in the face, like his prose might suggest he would.

Not that Taibbi is apologizing for his combative posture. “I’m certainly not going to feel guilty for having success at Substack for saying things I believe are true. I’ve been very consistent over the years in saying the same things,” Taibbi said. “I feel pretty strongly that the only thing that’s changed is that the New York media world once agreed with the things I was saying, and now they don’t.”

If you follow the media and the internecine warfare that’s liable to consume any given afternoon on Twitter, you probably have an opinion about Matt Taibbi. Few journalists, in polarized 2021, divide the New York-D.C. nexus more. Taibbi is viewed in more liberal quarters with increasing suspicion bordering on outright disdain, a remarkable development for a magazine star once considered Rolling Stone’s successor to Hunter S. Thompson.

Taibbi is — or was, depending on your view — one of the most celebrated investigative journalists of his generation. In the 2000s, during the height of the financial crisis, he was lauded for his incisive, bilious takedowns of Wall Street — particularly Goldman Sachs as the infamous “vampire squid.” He won a National Magazine award and regularly appeared on cable television, grinning like an impish schoolboy even as his hair receded. In college journalism classes throughout the country, Taibbi was a rare hero, Bob Woodward shed of pomposity. He was the ultimate insider-outsider, a chronicler of presidential campaigns and corporate malfeasance who lost none of his edge even as his star burned brighter.

Today, Taibbi is flush. He is no longer affiliated with Rolling Stone, but his Substack newsletter, TK News, is one of the most popular on the site, boasting more than 30,000 paying subscribers. Which means, at $50 a pop, he easily can clear $1 million annually, making him a member of the one percent. In addition, he hosts a popular podcast, Useful Idiots, with the comedian and filmmaker Katie Halper, where the two debate hot-button media issues and interview unconventional leftists like Chris Hedges, Adolph Reed, and Dennis Kucinich.

Raising three children in tony Mountain Lakes, New Jersey, Taibbi is more than content with his current lot. The pandemic has kept him at home — otherwise, he said, he would have traveled extensively throughout 2020 and 2021 — filing his distinctive mix of reportage and punditry. At 51, he should be entering the glorious middle phase of the prestige journalist’s lifecycle: escalating praise, escalating awards, a steady march toward media canonization.

None of that is coming anytime soon.

“I think he’s gone off the rails,” said Doug Henwood, a longtime progressive journalist who once counted himself among Taibbi’s admirers. “Now I just don’t know what the hell he’s going on and on about. He’s obsessed with stupid shit.”

What happened to Matt Taibbi? Everything or nothing, depending on your vantage point. Taibbi is, arguably, as ribald and fearless as ever. It’s just that his targets and topics have begun to shift. He does not write as much on Wall Street or corporate skullduggery anymore, preferring to train his sights on the campus left and the talking heads at MSNBC. Taibbi’s defenders say he hasn’t changed. Rather, it’s the world that has grown more illiberal and hysterical.

“I think, roughly speaking, there are two kinds of journalists — one type wedded to a partisan faction or ideological identity and the second devoted to a more journalistic ethos,” said fellow Substacker Glenn Greenwald. “Oftentimes, the people who are in the first group confuse those in the second group with being part of their group. Matt has always had a journalistic ethos, always questioned orthodoxies and pieties.”

“I think that our business, for being packed with so many radicals and liberals, is inherently conservative,” said Jack Shafer, Politico’s media columnist. “When somebody does something differently, it rankles people.”

Politically, Taibbi describes himself as a “run-of-the-mill, old-school ACLU liberal” who counts Bernie Sanders among the few politicians he actually admires. “The only thing I would say that’s different about my political thinking — and it has nothing to do with policy and politics — suddenly I’m getting along better with people who are Republicans,” he said.

Like Christopher Hitchens, Taibbi has a singular ability to infuriate the left. His most viewed Substack post, published in June 2020, remains “The American Press Is Destroying Itself.” Lately, he has blasted away at NPR and other left-leaning media, the “vaccine aristocrats” who shame the unvaccinated, popular anti-racist authors like Robin DiAngelo, and those who hope Facebook and Twitter will take far more aggressive action against lies and hateful rhetoric spread by the far right.

Not long ago, he offered a defense of Tucker Carlson. FiveThirtyEight, the high church of bloodless empiricism, recently lashed Taibbi for promoting the “baseless conspiracy theory” that a drug called Ivermectin can treat COVID-19. (Taibbi successfully won a correction, with the website conceding it “mischaracterized” his stance.)

Taibbi’s critics view him as a reporter turned red-pilled culture warrior chasing subscriptions — or worse, a middle-aged male no longer at the vanguard, aggrieved that younger journalists are now leading the fight for justice. “One of a crew of a dozen white guy contrarians in media,” said the journalist Wesley Lowery.

The liberal-left especially loathes the way Taibbi equates the right- and left-wing media. His second-most recent book, Hate Inc., features Rachel Maddow and Sean Hannity on the cover together, and argues that both sides have played a role in polarizing the country and stoking hate. Taibbi has gone as far as to argue that Fox News, the propaganda arm of the Republican Party that is still the ratings king, “no longer represents real institutional political influence in this country anymore. The financial/educational/political elite with all the power is on the other side and I think they’re the people to be worrying about.”

Taibbi’s reputation these days is inextricably tied to Substack. There is, of course, no single style of Substack writer (I write a Substack newsletter myself), but the platform has attracted numerous media dissidents — including Bari Weiss, Andrew Sullivan, Matt Yglesias, and Greenwald — suggesting a market need that isn’t being met by the traditional press.

Where these writers converge — and where outrage for their cohort simmers among many liberals in media and politics — is in their willingness to excoriate what the essayist Wesley Yang, another prominent Substacker, has termed “successor ideology.” At their core, all of these writers, Taibbi included, share a discomfort with the identity-based politics that has consumed much of media and academia over the last few years, particularly in the wake of George Floyd’s death and the mass protests against police brutality that followed.

Some have written critically of two of the best-selling anti-racist authors in America, Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, arguing that they are steering America down a course of unsustainable sectarian warfare, divorced from a humanistic tradition of open debate and respect for free speech. Taibbi has called DiAngelo, the White Fragility author, a purveyor of “tricked-up pseudo-intellectual horseshit.”

Many of them have also argued that the authoritarian threat posed by Donald Trump and his Republican Party is overstated. Many bemoan what they see as an overly woke, censorious culture in media and politics, with younger millennials demanding fresh limits on speech. For Taibbi, tech censorship has become an overriding concern. He runs a regular feature on his Substack called “Meet the Censored,” where he interviews various journalists and thinkers, a sizable number on the left, who have been casualties of Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter’s crackdown on disinformation in the Trump era.

Taibbi is reluctant to categorize himself as a culture warrior. “A lot of criticism has centered on this idea that I’m only writing about cancel culture and that sort of thing, but that’s actually not the case,” Taibbi insisted, pointing to his review of Christopher Lasch’s 1979 tome, The Culture of Narcissism, and an old-fashioned investigation into predatory student loans.

But Taibbi is quite obviously preoccupied with cultural affairs, especially in media. “The culture-war stuff is popular,” he conceded. “I do find it extremely interesting. A lot of these developments came up in the last couple of years — they’re the background for why I came to Substack in the first place — and involve this growing discomfort I had with Rolling Stone that started with Russiagate and then became this thing where I was just increasingly aware of this self-censorship going on. You’re increasingly worried about every little thing you say. Every day, there’s this new taboo in blue-leaning media.

“I was covering the campaign and having discussions with people on the bus. They were saying we have to start doing the job differently,” Taibbi recalled. “You started to see it, the moment where being interested in the news in a voyeuristic way disappeared and you had to take an interest as a participant in what was happening so that a lot of things that attracted me to journalism, that detached sense of humor you get in newsrooms — that vanished overnight. Suddenly people are taking sides and putting their thumb on the scale.”

Taibbi locates the shift in mainstream media to the 2016 presidential campaign. He cites Jim Rutenberg’s column in the Times as something of a starting gun. Rutenberg, then the media columnist, wrote in August of 2016 that if you were a journalist who believed Trump “is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalistic tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators,” you had to “throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the better part of the past half-century, if not longer, and approach it in a way you’ve never approached anything in your career.”

But what if Trump wasn’t a fascist, after all? What if he was just a lousy, unhinged Republican president? When do journalists slam the emergency button? “During that early Trump period, I felt continually that I was put in the difficult position of having to either co-sign an erroneous piece of anti-Trump propaganda or be accused of being a Trump-lover,” Taibbi said. “I certainly lost a lot of audience during those years, and like Glenn was the subject of a lot of criticism from within the business, for not being sufficiently aggressive in my coverage of Trump. However, that had nothing to do with how I felt about him, and everything to do with an increasing unease with the way he was being covered.”

The irony is that Taibbi built his career stomping on the textbook of American journalism. “After the 2008 crash, when the mainstream papers kept telling audiences how complicated the subprime mess was, I attracted a lot of readers just by saying simple things like, ‘Actually, this stuff isn’t that hard, these people are basically just thieves,’” he said.

“I’ve always rejected the objective style personally, preferring just to be open about my biases and thoughts,” Taibbi added, noting that he agrees with younger journalists, like Wesley Lowery, that the traditional neutral voice or “view from nowhere” is outmoded. Taibbi sees his work these days as being inspired less by Hitchens and Thompson than H.L. Mencken, the essayist and cultural critic known for, among many things, his satirical reporting of the Scopes Monkey Trial. “Especially in an atmosphere where people feel constrained and afraid to say certain things, I think there’s a role for someone to try to do what Mencken did, which was basically undress everyone and skewer sacred cows,” he says. “Mencken would have had a tough time in today’s environment.”

The way that the mainstream media has erred, in Taibbi’s view, is by growing too overtly ideological — by becoming, in at least one important respect, too much like Matt Taibbi. “A lot of my readers are people who talk about how they can’t read the Times or listen to NPR or watch MSNBC because they’re so tired of the leaden messaging,” he said.

Taibbi’s tortured relationship with the media, swerving between its golden boy and one of its fiercest antagonists, is his birthright. The only child of Mike Taibbi, a veteran broadcast journalist who worked at NBC and ABC, he grew up outside Boston, often feeling alienated. His parents split up when he was young, his mother largely raising him while going to law school at night. As a teenager, he wanted to be a novelist, falling in love with Russian writers like Nikolai Gogol and Mikhail Bulgakov. “If you need 100 things to be a good fiction writer, I’m probably missing seven of them, the seven really important ones,” he says. “I don’t have a good ear for inventing details.”

Behavioral and academic difficulties landed him in a private school, Concord Academy, where his parents hoped he’d shape up. “I was confused, lonely, had an authority problem, had really lost my way in adolescence, and this was a solution for all of us,” he said. Upon graduating from Bard College in 1992, he headed to Russia, in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse, with a plan to string for newspapers while writing his great novel. The novel didn’t arrive and Taibbi, going door-to-door at all the foreign bureaus in Moscow, wasn’t published much elsewhere either. Eventually he was offered a real job at an expat paper, the Moscow Times.

It was in Russia, in the late 1990s, where Taibbi had his first taste of renown and infamy. A fellow American named Mark Ames recruited him to help edit a newspaper called The eXile. Decades later, the newspaper retains it notoriety, making the more fire-breathing alternative weeklies in America look like church newsletters in comparison. Regular columns included Ames’s “Death Porn,” which rehashed stories of horrific murders and suicides from police reports and Russian media. One of the most reviled (and anticipated) Ames features was “Whore-R Stories,” in which he hired prostitutes and wrote about them.

There were the pranks that anticipated Taibbi’s later attitudes toward the respectable press. Furious that the Times’ Michael Wines had endorsed the Kosovo war and conducted a softball interview with Vladimir Putin, Taibbi and Ames conspired to fill a thermos with horse semen, put it into a baked pie, and smash him with it in the face. Taibbi did the honors, writing it all up with a photo of a forlorn Wines, crust and filling stuck to his mug.

Occasionally, the two men tended bar at an infamous local hangout, the Hungry Duck, where only women, on so-called “ladies night,” would be let in from 6:30 to 9. They drank for free. “There were 250 beautiful women in this packed bar and completely drunk and in would charge all the men, paying a massive cover fee to get in,” Taibbi remembered. “After that, it was a complete bacchanal, you had fights, people having sex on the floor.” In a 2010 account of The eXile years in Vanity Fair, the Hungry Duck was described as a “vile flesh pit” where the deputy head of a Moscow police unit, drunk out of his mind, could empty his pistol into the ceiling and make everyone lie on the floor for three hours.

Ames did speed and Taibbi developed a heroin addiction. “I was never an IV user but it was bad,” he said. “I had problems with opioids throughout my life.” He kicked the habit when he came back to the States and found he didn’t have a dealer anymore. “You’ve seen Trainspotting?” he asked. “It was hard.”

But there was journalism, too — enough of it that The eXile, in its relatively short existence, could make its mark. Taibbi wrote on the IMF’s policy in Russia, Moscow prisons, and labor strikes. He spent time among crime bosses, cops, and corrupt politicians, writing an illuminating series in which he lived as an ordinary Russian for weeks at a time. He was a miner and a bricklayer. He attended a Moscow high school. Meanwhile, the international cognoscenti and many of the Americans working at prestige newspapers in Moscow were convinced that American-style free enterprise and democracy were afoot. As decided outsiders, Taibbi and Ames could effectively puncture the narrative that post-Soviet Russia was a Western success story.

“He wrote some insane shit but they basically had it right,” said Ben Smith, the New York Times media columnist. “The Washington consensus was that Russia was becoming a democracy; The eXile portrayed it as going to hell.”

Taibbi and Ames would have a bitter falling out; the two haven’t spoken in almost 20 years. Taibbi left The eXile several years before it folded in 2008, heading back to America to further his journalism career. Ames declined to comment for this story. “This sounds too depressing,” he said. “Good luck with it.”

Other eXile alums weren’t interested in speaking much either. “I’ve said everything I wanted to say about Matt in what I’ve written about him,” said former eXile editor Yasha Levine, who recently criticized Taibbi for belonging to the “new reactionary right.” “Matt and his career trajectory are just too sad and pathetic to waste any more of my time on. American political culture is cursed. What the fuck is the point?”

Taibbi’s work at The eXile would come back to haunt him decades later, with the Me Too movement in full swing. Just as Taibbi was preparing to promote his new book on the police killing of Eric Garner, I Can’t Breathe, passages from a 2000 book co-written by Taibbi and Ames on The eXile years resurfaced. Both men, especially Ames, trafficked in twisted satire. Passages written by Ames described purported sexual harassment at The eXile and portrayed Ames as having sex with a 15-year-old girl, coercing a woman into having an abortion, and raping other Russian women. Both men insisted none of it was true, but accusations of misogyny spread across the internet.

In 2017, as the firestorm built, Kathy Lally of the Washington Post wrote that she and other female journalists who served as correspondents in Moscow were subject to boorish writings and pranks from Taibbi. “The eXile’s distinguishing feature, more than anything else, was its blinding sexism — which often targeted me.” (Lally declined to comment for this story.)

Taibbi offered a lengthy Facebook apology in wake of the controversy while denying he sexually harassed anyone. “As a young man, I wrote and said some very dumb and hurtful things,” he wrote. “But it was never more than that. I know the list of revealed harassers is growing, but I am not on that list, nor should I be. I belong to a much bigger group. I was young once, and a jerk. And I am sorry for that.”

The damage, to some extent, was done. Taibbi’s publisher, Penguin Random House, dropped him. His relationship with Rolling Stone would continue, but not for much longer. Elizabeth Spiers, a longtime media observer and founding editor of Gawker, argues Taibbi’s experience with Me Too precipitated his fierce attacks on the left. “It tapped into some white male grievance things he has,” Spiers said. “If you look at his critiques more recently, they’re knee-jerk, on the other side whatever the left is interested in right now.”

The controversy still rankles Taibbi. “I wrote some absolutely disgustingly offensive stuff, but particularly in my case this was almost 100 percent a pose, as I’m kind of a recluse and wallflower in my private life,” he said. “The drug aspect was real, but a lot of the rest of it was done for effect, to be deliberately offensive, because the conceit of The eXile was that it was the unvarnished tourist guide for the plundering Ugly American — if conquistadors wrote Time Out, for instance.”

Back when Taibbi was interviewed for the Vanity Fair piece on The eXile, he grew so enraged with the journalist, James Verini — Verini called Taibbi and Ames’s eXile book “redundant” and “discursive” — that he cursed Verini out and threw coffee in his face.

An older Taibbi, still not feeling much warmth for Verini, mostly agrees with his assessment of the book. “It was a complete misread of what the average American would care about,” he says. “It’s kind of embarrassing to look back on now.”

Rolling Stone had written a feature on the eXile in 1998 and one their editors at the time, Will Dana, was keeping an eye on Taibbi. Dana believed, ultimately correctly, that Taibbi could be a star there if given the leeway to write and report in his distinctive register. Soon the former enfant terrible was reporting from Katrina-ravaged New Orleans and filing scathing, must-read dispatches from the 2004 presidential campaign.

Taibbi the magazine employee was reserved, reliable, and never blew a deadline, according to Dana, who recalled he brought flowers for the fact-checkers after a piece was headed off to print to thank them for their efforts. “He never played the star diva card,” Dana says. There were moments, certainly, when he could have: By 2011, protesters at Occupy Wall Street were toting around vampire-squid puppets, directly inspired by his reporting.

Dana is one of the old Rolling Stone hands, along with former executive editor Eric Bates, who count themselves among Taibbi’s steadfast admirers. Bates, who now edits Insider, recalled that Taibbi was one of the only journalists he had worked with who had a significant impact on the broader culture. “We had interviewed Obama a number of times and we would get reader questions asking, ‘What’s he like?’ We started to get that with Matt. ‘What’s he like?’ No one does that with a writer. Most people in the world aren’t curious about what a writer is like as a person.”

Taibbi briefly left Rolling Stone in 2014 to run Racket, an investigative magazine published by the billionaire Pierre Omidyar, but clashes with management led to his return to Rolling Stone. Into 2021, his podcast, Useful Idiots, was still affiliated with the magazine. And then, suddenly, it wasn’t. The reasons seem to be bound up with Taibbi’s general disillusionment with the industry.

“One of the moments that solidified in my mind the difficult path I’d have going forward in mainstream media, and that pushed me toward the decision to do Substack full-time, came when I did a campaign piece on Biden for Rolling Stone,” Taibbi said. “I was noticing what everyone else saw, that the man was having trouble remembering things, among other issues. I called back some of the medical sources who were glad to violate the ‘Goldwater rule’ against diagnosing people from afar to talk to me about Trump being crazy, just to ask for their assessment of Biden. None responded, and one literally hung up on me. Even off the record they wouldn’t talk about it. It hit me in that moment that Trump had so fundamentally changed the business that even sources were behaving differently, and I’d have to adapt one way or the other.

“I definitely became embittered toward mainstream colleagues during these years, who piled on and accused me of being a secret Trumper and a Putinite and all of these things, just for not signing off on hot takes like: Trump is a literal Russian spy, Trump is clinically insane, Trump is Hitler, America is literally a fascist state, etc.,” he continued. “In my mind a lot of them were making very cynical decisions just to ride the Resistance train to easy money by pumping up these hot-take crazes.

“I could have done that — with my background, I could easily have come up with some cockamamie Russia angle and probably even scored a big advance writing a book with a backwards ‘R’ in the cover headline and an upside-down St. Basil’s growing out of Trump’s head or whatever — but I didn’t do that, obviously.”

Taibbi isn’t wrong. The “grift” of the Trump years broke both ways, with six-figure book contracts routinely minted for any reporter or pundit who could hustle up gossip on the most deranged White House in anyone’s memory. One lament, though, among those who believe Taibbi has lost his way, is that the game he chases today might not be worth it.

Instead of throwing hedge-funders up against a wall, Taibbi is excoriating the media for failing to report on the fact that, despite the FDA and NIH advising against treating COVID patients with Ivermectin, some doctors are prescribing the drug off-label. Taibbi’s argument — that the news media can report health-care authorities are warning against Ivermectin as a treatment while acknowledging the drug is out there and being distributed — isn’t wrong. It’s more a matter of how one of the most talented reporters of his generation should wield his formidable powers in this uncertain age.

Taibbi believes the American media needs another Mencken, but there are enough heterodox thinkers that operate, in the realm of Substack at least, to flay whatever the predominant and misguided groupthink might be. Takedowns of NPR and the Democratic Party are not especially scarce. What is far more of an endangered species is the bold investigative reporter with enough time and money to produce the kinds of stories that terrify politicians and shift the Zeitgeist — the reporter that Taibbi used to be.

It’s a notion Taibbi, prone to more self-reflection than his public persona suggests, considers. “Obviously what I’m doing on Substack is different than what I’ve done in my career. I’ve spent most or all of that time, 30 years, doing the slogging investigative or pseudo-investigative kind of reporting,” he said. “I’ve earned a little time to not do that for a year or two.”

===

GGL 9 24 NEWS

Cato Institute

“A Brand-New Belief System”: Matt Taibbi on How the Trump Era Changed Media's Free Speech Stance. From the Twitter Files to unexpected IRS...

.Jun 20, 2024

New York Magazine

Is the Entire World Conspiring to Make It Look Like Trump Lost the Debate?

Matt Taibbi argues that Donald Trump was not baited by Kamala Harris into losing the debate but that the Democratic party controls the media...

.2 weeks ago

Newser

Debate Analysis Sounded a Little Fishy to Matt Taibbi

Matt Taibbi thinks the next-day analysis of the debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris sounded suspiciously familiar.

.2 weeks ago

Audacy

The Constitution, Unplugged: Matt Taibbi on DarkHorse

Bret speaks with Matt Taibbi on the subject of the censorship industrial complex. They discuss their views on the recent lack of reaction by traditional...

.3 days ago

The Hill

US taxpayers are funding censorship on behalf of State Department: Matt Taibbi

Independent journalist Matt Taibbi elaborates on a House Committee report that exposed an Obama-era program that funded efforts promoting...

.5 days ago

Fox News

Matt Taibbi: This is 'diabolical' and 'raises all sorts of questions'

Investigative journalist Matt Taibbi says the Harris campaign rewriting headlines in ads on Google is 'confusing the reader' on 'The Story...

.1 month ago

New York Post

Exclusive | State Department tried to discredit reporters, Republican pol over conservative 'blacklist'

The US State Department sought to discredit journalists and a member of Congress, as they went into damage control over having helped fund...

.2 weeks ago

Fox Business

Kamala Harris has a ‘fundamental misunderstanding’ of the First Amendment: Matt Taibbi

Investigative journalist Matt Taibbi weighs in on the recent threats to free speech during an appearance on 'Mornings with Maria.'

.3 weeks ago

RealClearPolitics

Matt Taibbi: People Need To Know About The Mass Censorship Regime Growing In The U.S.

Matt Taibbi discusses what he found in "The Twitter Files" at RCP''s first Samizdat Prize award ceremony last month and what the public...

.Apr 5, 2024

The New Republic

Twitter Files’ Matt Taibbi Says Elon Musk Sent Him Unhinged Messages

The former “Twitter Files” journalist has apparently fallen out of the good graces of billionaire Elon Musk.

.Feb 16, 2024

---

New York Post

Hey, Jack Smith — you’re fired!, welcome to a ‘new political era’ and other commentary

After “the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, a series of reversals may mark the beginning of a new political era,” marvels Matt...

.Jul 16, 2024

ScheerPost

Matt Taibbi: Why the TikTok Ban is so Dangerous

By Matt Taibbi / Racket News. It's funny how things work. Last year at this time, Americans overwhelmingly supported a ban on TikTok.

.Mar 15, 2024

RealClearInvestigations

Investigative Issues: Is the Electoral Fix Already In?

The 2024 presidential race increasingly looks like it will be decided by lawyers, not voters, as Democrats unveil plans for America's first...

.Jan 26, 2024

The Hill

Matt Taibbi: intel blob cooked the books in 2016 probe; Russians wanted Hillary, not Trump

Rising Founder of Racket News Matt Taibbi weighs in on the prospect of a possible second Donald Trump presidency.

.Feb 27, 2024

ScheerPost

Matt Taibbi: On “UK Files, Part 2”

After an unwieldy interruption, Racket just published the second part of Paul Holden's “UK Files” series, the first segment of which was published last October.

.Feb 1, 2024

WIRED

The Guerrilla Tactics of The Racket, and How It Almost Upended Journalism

The plan was to make an Internet magazine that mixed hard-hitting reporting and in-depth features with wicked, Spy magazine-style satire.

.Dec 15, 2014

RealClearInvestigations

Investigative Issues: RCI and Others Who Got Russiagate Right, and Paid a Price

RealClearInvestigations reporters Aaron Maté, Paul Sperry and Lee Smith are among media figures who exposed intelligence abuses in the...

.Feb 16, 2024

New York Post

Biden = Trump?, Harris’ ‘make it rain’ vow and other commentary

The push to make Joe Biden drop, marvels Racket News' Matt Taibbi, sank to comparing him to . . . Donald Trump.

.Jul 24, 2024

Vox

Racket Teen: the too-short life of the only website that mattered

Back in February, Matt Taibbi announced that he was joining Pierre Omidyar's First Look Media. His mission was to start a new web magazine...

.Nov 25, 2014

The Intercept

The Inside Story Of Matt Taibbi’s Departure From First Look Media

Matt Taibbi, who joined First Look Media just seven months ago, left the company on Tuesday. His departure—which he describes as a refusal to...

.Oct 30, 2014

---

REDDIT LEE FANG

Peggy

Jun 3

Liked by Lee Fang

Welcome to the new lonely. I feel stupid I didn’t see this coming. The most eloquent free speech advocates I admired are now the harsh censors they once despised. And blind to it, at that.

Kevan Hudson

Jun 3

Finding folks like Tucker Carlson or Matt Taibbi who are consistent in their principles or are willing to change their opinions based on new info are rare.

The elite have successfully divided many but I find that most common people are waking up to the “divide and conquer tactics.” I have hope as many Americans call the Democrats and the Republicans the “Uniparty”, and Brits are calling their election “The Uniparty Election”.

We shall overcome!

H8SBAD

Jun 8

I’d like to nominate Shellenberger, Brand, Rogan and Greenwald to join the Tucker and Taibbi consistency club. Oh, and let’s throw in a couple of pols from Kentucky not named McConnell (Massie and Paul). Thanks for your consideration.

---

https://www.alternet.org/matt-taibbi/

no lnx

Matt Taibbi could face years in prison over 'false and misleading' testimony suggests House Democrat

Gideon Rubin and Raw Story April 21, 2023

A House Democrat has threatened journalist Matt Taibbi with imprisonment over his testimony before Congress last month in connection with the Twitter Files.

Rep. Stacey Plaskett (D-VI) in a letter to Taibbi alleges his March 9 testimony before the House Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Weaponization “has since been revealed to be false and misleading.”

Plaskett’s threat to imprison a journalist drew instant rebuke and at least one call for her to resign.

“Lawmakers should not be sending these kinds of letters to journalists. Ironic this is from a ‘weaponization’ committee member,” media journalist and former Reliable Sources host Brian Stelter tweeted.

The Intercept’s Ryan Grim tweeted: “Dem Rep. Stacey Plaskett is threatening @mtaibbi with prison over his Twitter Files testimony. The testimony is actually accurate-though she’s referring to an error in a tweet that’s been corrected. That’s beside the point: To call for a reporter to be jailed is beyond the pale.”

Grim in a reply called for the congresswoman’s resignation.

“She should resign from Congress for this and at minimum should be removed from the committee. The press is not the enemy of the people and threatening reporters with prison — especially as we work to free Evan in Moscow — is reckless and dangerous,” he tweeted.

The letter, addressed March 13, cites an error Taibbi admitted to during an April 6 appearance on the Medhi Hasan Show on MSNBC among his chief transgressions.

...

The letter, addressed March 13, cites an error Taibbi admitted to during an April 6 appearance on the Medhi Hasan Show on MSNBC among his chief transgressions.

“During that interview, Mr. Hasan pointed out that your March 9 tweet added a parenthetical [A] to the acronym CIS, changing the meaning of the term from ‘Center for Internet Security’ —a private organization —to ‘Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency,” Plaskett’s letter said.

“This mistake is important because, by adding an ‘A,’ you weren’t making a harmless spelling error. Rather, you were alleging that CISA – a government entity—was working with the EIP to have posts removed from social media. When presented with this misinformation, you acknowledged that you had made ‘an error’ by intentionally altering the acronym CIS and you subsequently deleted your erroneous tweet.”

She further alleged the Griftopia author’s reporting to be “rife with numerous other false or misleading claims.”

“I would like to provide you with an opportunity to correct the hearing recordto ensure accuracy in a congressional hearing and so that the public and their representatives are not misled,” her letter said.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Matt Taibbi's Blockbuster Cover Story Exposes Key Culprits in Financial Crash ›

The Ultimate 9/11 'Truth' Showdown: David Ray Griffin vs. Matt Taibbi -- Part II ›

'Tankie truth-teller' Matt Taibbi lampooned following MSNBC host’s 'public beat-down' ›

“The Twitter Files” failed to reveal meaningful evidence of collusion and represent another stumble in Musk's Twitter takeover

Twitter founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey had previously acknowledged that Twitter made mistakes in its decision to suppress the story, a sentiment which other now-former executives have echoed. Dorsey had even testified before Congress to explain the same claims that Musk, Taibbi, and right-wing media have incorrectly framed as being hidden from the public,” and an analysis by Washington Post columnist Philip Bump determined that Twitter’s actions around the Hunter Biden story did not cost Donald Trump the 2020 election. As Bump explained, “there’s no evidence that the restriction imposed by Twitter (or Facebook) actually kept interested people from learning about the story.”

Continuing their insatiable appetite for the Hunter Biden laptop story, however, right-wing media figures cited Taibbi’s reporting as clear evidence that Big Tech meddled in the 2020 election, while others claimed Joe Biden was involved in blocking the unconfirmed New York Post story, baselessly asserting that the White House colluded with Twitter on this decision. (Biden had yet to be elected in October 2020 and was still on the campaign trail when Twitter decided to suppress the story.) Additionally, some right-wing media figures conceded that the Twitter Files were “not the smoking gun we’d hoped for,” yet still insisted that Taibbi’s report showed a clear “violation of the First Amendment.”

Right-wing figures used Taibbi’s report to baselessly claim that Twitter “colluded” in the 2020 election by suppressing the New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop

On Twitter, Fox host Laura Ingraham called for Big Tech to be reined in, comparing Twitter blocking the unconfirmed story about Hunter Biden to Russian interference in U.S. elections. In a December 2 tweet, Ingraham said, “Russian interference & meddling? Tonight we expose Twitter interference & meddling in the 2020 campaign. Sleazier than we thought—it’s time to rein in Big Tech. GOP better do it.” Twitter, [12/2/22]
Students for Trump founder Ryan Fournier claimed that Joe Biden won the 2020 election because Twitter helped him, calling the report “damning.”Fournier tweeted on December 2, “The Twitter Files release is damning. Everything we believed is being confirmed true. Twitter colluded in the 2020 election and helped Biden win.” Twitter, [12/2/22]
Far-right conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec asserted that Twitter’s decision to suppress the New York Post story amounted to a “digital insurrection.” Twitter, [12/2/22]
----
judicial Watch President Tom Fitton, who helped Trump devise a strategy to claim that the 2020 election was stolen, claimed the Twitter Files proved that Democrats and Big Tech worked together to get Biden elected. In a series of tweets, Fitton said that the “Democratic Party (DNC) colluded with @Twitter to censor opponents just before 2020 election. #ElectionInterference,” and claimed, “Assault on democratic gov't and more election interference CONFIRMED in @ElonMusk's @Twitter files.” Twitter, [12/2/22; 12/2/22]
Conservative comedian Terrence K. Williams insinuated that the suppression of the Hunter Biden story was the reason Trump lost the 2020 election. On December 2, Williams tweeted, “Twitter interfered with the 2020 Election and those involved should be held accountable. President Trump should be in the White House right now.” Twitter, [12/2/22]
On Fox & Friends, co-host Pete Hegseth chalked up Twitter’s actions to election interference while acting as “an arm of the Democratic National Committee.” Co-host Steve Doocy admitted that “there is no smoking gun per se,” but Hegseth erroneously claimed that voters didn’t “get to read about” the heavily covered Hunter Biden story, “which means they're not factored in when they vote, which is the definition of election interference.” Fox News, Fox & Friends, [12/5/22]

Right-wing figures attacked Biden for Twitter’s actions, with some alleging collusion between the White House and Twitter even though Biden wasn’t president yet

- Jack Posobiec attempted to paint Taibbi’s report as evidence to impeach Biden. On Twitter, Posobiec called for an impeachment inquiry into Biden because “the Twitter Files show Twitter was Censoring [users based] on Direct Requests from the Biden Team in October 2020.” Twitter, [12/2/22]
- Conservative commentator Buck Sexton claimed that the story constituted a “massive scandal, and Biden should rightly be IMPEACHED for it.” Twitter, [12/2/22]
- ---
  - fox News host Jesse Watters wrongly characterized Biden as the sitting president in 2020 to assert collusion between Twitter and the White House. He incorrectly asserted, “The Biden White House had a direct line to challenge and take down content they didn't like.” Fox News, *Jesse Watters Primetime*, [12/2/22]
  - On Fox’s Hannity, guest Tammy Bruce claimed that Twitter and Facebook were acting as “agents of the state” in suppressing the story.Bruce ended her appearance by bizarrely asserting that Twitter had single handedly “abolished” the First Amendment. Fox News,*Hannity*, [12/2/22]

Right-wing figures demanded that Twitter employees involved in blocking the New York Post story face prosecution or jail time

- - Terrence K. Williams called for “every Twitter employee who interfered in the 2020 Election” to be arrested. Twitter, [12/2/22]

[twt]

Fox host Jeanine Pirro said on Fox & Friends Weekend that the Twitter Files story “amounts to election interference, and when have you the suppression of the First Amendment – free speech – that results in election interference [but not hush money to hookers], there’s got to be a prosecution.”She also insisted that “we already know” Trump would have won the election if Twitter did not suppress the Hunter Biden story. Fox News, *Fox & Friends Weekend*, [12/4/22]

Right-wing pundits expressed disappointment that Musk and Taibbi didn’t reveal a “smoking gun” but insisted that Twitter violated the First Amendment

- - Conservative radio host Sebastian Gorka admitted to being “deeply underwhelmed” by Taibbi’s thread, saying: “We know the Dems in DC collude with the Dems in Palo Alto. Big Whop. Need a paper trail of felonies. Elon better have that.”Gorka went on to explain during a Twitter Spaces Q&A with Musk on December 3 that what Taibbi cites in his thread doesn’t show government suppression, isn’t a First Amendment violation, and therefore isn’t “a smoking gun.” Twitter, [12/2/22; 12/5/22]
  - Washington Free Beacon reporter Andrew Kerr tweeted that none of the photos referenced by Taibbi “appear to show Hunter engaged in illegal activities.” He went on to call it “newsworthy that team Biden was asking Twitter to remove any tweets period.” Twitter, [12/2/22]
  - Washington Free Beacon reporter Chuck Ross tweeted that “there has to be an interesting story on how Twitter decided to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story, but we didn’t see it tonight.” He added, “FBI was meeting with Twitter on a weekly basis in 2020. Let’s see the docs about that.” Twitter, [12/2/22]
  - Right-wing personalities the Hodgetwins tweeted, “It % is, collusion between govt. and big tech to violate the First Amendment.” The tweet was in reply to one from Musk saying, “If this isn’t a violation of the Constitution’s First Amendment, what is?” Twitter, [12/2/22]
  - Tom Fitton said that the Twitter files “further confirm” the Democratic Party’s “opposition to the First Amendment.” Twitter, [12/2/22]

[twt]
- - miranda Devine, a New York Post columnist who writes frequently about Hunter Biden and Big Tech, confessed on Fox’s Tucker Carlson Tonight that the Twitter Files were “not really the smoking gun we'd hoped for.” She went on to accuse Musk of withholding documents that “law enforcement specifically warned off Twitter from our story.” Fox News, *Tucker Carlson Tonight*, [12/2/22]
  - Fox News legal analyst Gregg Jarrett claimed that “Musk deserves a medal for revealing how the Biden campaign, FBI and media censored the Hunter Biden scandal.” In an opinion piece published at FoxNews.com, Jarrett alleged that “the Biden campaign team and Democratic operatives —with a key assist from partisans at the FBI— applied pressure on the social media giant Twitter to block the story.” He later wrote that “it is a violation of the First Amendment for the government to engage in censorship either overtly or covertly,” which “includes the FBI manipulating or coercing companies to behave as proxies to accomplish otherwise prohibited censorship.” Fox News, [12/6/22]

The hollow revelations of the Twitter Files come amid Musk’s supposed free speech crusade since taking control of the social media platform, marked by the CEO giving special attention to extremists, conspiracy theories, and misinformation. Twitter’s internal algorithms have already demonstrated a bias in favor of right-leaning accounts, and Musk’s high-profile actions have only further mainstreamed fringe narratives on the platform.

===

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11499511/Elon-Musk-says-Twitters-actions-definition-election-interference.html

kari ref elon daily mail

daily mail uk no lnx twt etc

elon Musk says Twitter's censorship of Hunter Biden laptop story was the 'definition of election interference' and that firm 'was acting as an arm of the DNC'

Musk spoke for nearly two hours in a 'Twitter Spaces' audio chat on Saturday

He addressed files illuminating Twitter's censorship ahead of 2020 election

Claimed Twitter acted as an 'arm of the Democratic National Committee'

Files released Friday showed Twitter staff discussing ban on Hunter laptop story

They also show requests from 'Biden team' to remove nude images of Hunter

By KEITH GRIFFITH FOR DAILYMAIL.COM

PUBLISHED: 21:45 EST, 3 December 2022 | UPDATED: 22:29 EST, 3 December 2022

Elon Musk has claimed that Twitter's censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop scandal was tantamount to interference in the 2020 election.

Musk made the claim in a wide-ranging two-hour audio chat on Twitter Spaces on Saturday night, one day after the publication of internal files relating to Twitter's October 2020 ban on initial reporting of the laptop contents.

'If Twitter is doing one team's bidding before an election shutting down dissenting voices on a pivotal election that is the definition of election interference,' said Musk.

'Frankly Twitter was acting like an arm of the Democratic National Committee, it was absurd,' added the billionaire, who has been highly critical of prior management at the company he purchased five weeks ago.

:{:{}:

In the audio chat, Musk also claimed Apple had 'fully resumed' advertising on Twitter following a pullback, and said that he banned Kanye West for 'incitement to violence' for a tweet displaying a Nazi swastika.

View gallery

Elon Musk has claimed that Twitter's censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop scandal was tantamount to interference in the 2020 election

Musk made the claim in a wide-ranging two-hour audio chat on Twitter Spaces on Saturday night, one day after the publication of internal files from October 2020

View gallery

Much of the conversation was devoted to the so-called 'Twitter Files,' a selection of internal documents released by journalist Matt Taibbi on Friday night.

The documents included internal Twitter emails appearing to show staffers removing tweets showing a nude Hunter Biden at the behest of Joe Biden's 2020 presidential campaign and the DNC.

However, Taibbi himself said that the files contained 'no evidence - that I've seen' that the Biden campaign had a role in suppressing the New York Post's story on Hunter's business dealings, which was controversially banned from Twitter.

Musk said in the chat on Saturday that in addition to Taibbi, he had given the files to Bari Weiss.

Musk said he had given the journalists 'unfettered access' to old internal documents, and did not guide or control how they were revealed or reported.

'This is not a North Korea tour guide situation, you get to go anywhere you want, whenever you want, however you want,' he said. 'I'm not controlling the narrative.'

'It's just obvious there's been a lot of control of information, supression of information, including things that affected elections, and that just all need to be...you just want to have the stuff out there,' he said.

Musk said in the chat on Saturday that in addition to Matt Taibbi (left), he had given the files to journalist Bari Weiss (right)

Participating in the chat, former Trump administration official Sebastian Gorka asked whether there was any evidence of actual government interference in Twitter's moderation, since the documents released only showed requests from the Biden campaign.

:{:{}:

Musk did not directly answer the question, and admitted 'I have not read the Twitter Files so that's why my understanding is limited.'

Musk also said he thought it was 'possible' that personnel at the social media firm gave preference to left-wing candidates during Brazil's election this year, without providing evidence.

Musk completed his acquisition of Twitter on Oct. 27, just days before Brazil's presidential second round runoff vote, when far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro was defeated by leftist Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

'I've seen a lot of concerning tweets about the recent Brazil election,' Musk wrote on Twitter when asked by a user about elections possibly 'handled' by the company's previous management.

Weeks ahead of the election in October 2020, Twitter prevented sharing of a story about Hunter Biden's international business dealings, based on emails from his laptop

View gallery

'If those tweets are accurate, it's possible that Twitter personnel gave preference to left wing candidates,' added the billionaire.

Separately, Musk also addressed his move to ban Kanye West from Twitter once again this week, following the rapper's latest anti-Semitic meltdown.

'With Kanye it's obviously a difficult subject, but that was a case where, that was my decision. I think it's important people know that was my decision,' he said.

West was banned for posting an image of a swastika within a Star of David, a Jewish religious symbol, something Musk explained he viewed as an 'incitement to violence.'

'I personally wanted to punch Kanye, so it's definitely inciting me to violence, so that's not cool,' he said.

Musk said that context was important, and that a swastika in a historical context, such as a history of World War II, would not necessarily be offensive in the same way.

Meanwhile, in emerged on Saturday that the tweets that were removed at the request of the DNC and Biden campaign appeared to center of pornographic images of Hunter Biden.

In one of these emails, sent ten days after The New York Postfirst broke the laptop story on October 14 of that year, Twitter staffers were asked to 'review' five tweets deemed problematic by 'the Biden team.'

One of the tweets removed at the request of the Biden campaign is seen above. The original image, which showed Hunter Biden nude from the waist down, has been cropped above

View gallery

'More to review from the Biden team,' that staffer's redacted correspondence read - garnering a reply hours later from another Twitter employee - one that assured the worker the task had been 'handled.'

That same day, another email reveals that there was an additional complaint from the DNC and two more tweets were deleted.

It is not clear from the leaked emails what the deleted tweets were about, however Washington Free Beacon investigative reporter Andrew Kerr said he had discovered the contents of several of the tweets.

He said three of the tweets the Biden camp demanded be deleted contained 'Hunter Biden porn' and photos of Biden's genitalia, from the laptop.

He claims one of the tweets requested to be deleted by the DNC was from actor James Woods and depicted Hunter smoking crack and a committing a sex act.

And he says the second tweet was a link to Hunter Biden weighing and using drugs, and another link to a Hunter Biden sex tape.

Share or comment on this article: Elon Musk says Twitter's actions were the 'definition of election interference'

===

an 12 22

Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) is vowing to bring Twitter employees before Congress as part of an investigative effort to determine how they may have censored reports on Hunter Biden's laptop during the 2020 election cycle.

On Friday, December 3, the Kentucky lawmaker appeared on Fox News where he spoke with guest host Jason Chaffetz who asked him about the report written by Substack journalist Matt Taibbi. According to Taibbi's report, there was an "organized effort at Twitter" to suppress the circulation of the story.

Mediaite reports that "Taibbi, whose source was Elon Musk, reported Democrats and Republicans both had back channels that killed unfavorable tweets."

According to the news outlet, the journalist also claimed "internal Twitter files showed Democrats had more channels that were used to suppress unfavorable tweets and initial reports on Hunter Biden’s laptop."

Chaffetz, also a former chairman of the House Oversight Committee said, “They can’t figure out how to justify this type of suppression. What can Congress, what can the Oversight Committee do, and where are they going to go next with this?”

The Republican lawmaker responded by sharing his intent as chairman of the committee. "When I take your old position as chairman of the House Oversight Committee, I can promise you this: every employee at Twitter who was involved in suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story will have an opportunity to come before Congress and explain their actions to the American people," Comer said. "This was a huge story."

He added, "When we announced the investigation of the Biden family and referenced material from the laptop, many in the mainstream media said this is just a conspiracy theory. The mainstream media is still trying to use the old talking points the laptop is somehow Russian disinformation."

According to Comer, Musk's decision to share Twitter's files with Taibbi suggests there was some form of collusive effort to diminish the circulation of reports on the social platform. The Republican lawmaker also commended theNew York Post for its original report which was published in October 2020.

He concluded by saying, “We are going to have every person at Twitter in front of the House Oversight Committee."

Watch the video below or at this link.

===

hate inc book

https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-november-4-2019/

still lukewarm on collusion/ukraine

addiction to anger, ~ Other ppl, dopamine

blood funnel of vampire squid:

goldman sachs grt recession

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-great-american-bubble-machine-20100405

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/bernie-sanders-washington-post-media-complaint-872349/

Next Contestant, Iran: Meet America’s Permanent War Formula

When it comes to starting wars, we don’t even bother to change the script anymore

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/iran-trump-america-permanent-war-formula-850712/

By MATT TAIBBI

with glen g on mueler

https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/matt-taibbi-has-a-sobering-conclusion-at-the-close-of-the-mueller-investigation/

Ezekiel in Exile

Matt Taibbi has a sobering take today on the conclusion of the Mueller investigation:

Nothing Trump is accused of from now on by the press will be believed by huge chunks of the population, a group that (perhaps thanks to this story) is now larger than his original base. As Baker notes, a full 50.3% of respondents in a poll conducted this month said they agree with Trump the Mueller probe is a “witch hunt.”

There is a price to be paid by both Democrats and nearly all the MSM for pushing such a sensational story (The President is owned by a foreign country!) without real evidence. Now that Mueller has included his investigation and still failed to indict a single individual on the basis of Trump-Russian collusion, everyone will pay a huge price in credibility with the public, especially with America’s largest political “party:” independents.

There was never real gray area here. Either Trump is a compromised foreign agent, or he isn’t. If he isn’t, news outlets once again swallowed a massive disinformation campaign, only this error is many orders of magnitude more stupid than any in the recent past, WMD included. Honest reporters like ABC’s Terry Moran understand: Mueller coming back empty-handed on collusion means a “reckoning for the media.”

Taibbi includes a helpful synopsis of the Russiagate timeline:

By June and July of 2016, bits of the dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele, which had been funded by the Democratic National Committeethrough the law firm Perkins Coie (which in turn hired the opposition research firm Fusion GPS), were already in the ether.

The Steele report occupies the same role in #Russiagate the tales spun by Ahmed Chalabi occupied in the WMD screwup. Once again, a narrative became turbo-charged when Officials With Motives pulled the press corps by its nose to a swamp of unconfirmable private assertions.

The opposition “research” that Clinton bought then needed a “hook” to be leaked for public consumption:

Comey was right. We couldn’t have reported this story without a “hook.” Therefore the reports surrounding Steele technically weren’t about the allegations themselves, but rather the journey of those allegations, from one set of official hands to another. Handing the report to Trump created a perfect pretext.

This trick has been used before, both in Washington and on Wall Street, to publicize unconfirmed private research. A short seller might hire a consulting firm to prepare a report on a company he or she has bet against. When the report is completed, the investor then tries to get the SEC or the FBI to take possession. If they do, news leaks the company is “under investigation,” the stock dives, and everyone wins.

Taibbi points out how ridiculous was the assertions about compromat being a unique problem of Trump:

Steele wrote of Russians having a file of “compromising information” on Hillary Clinton, only this file supposedly lacked “details/evidence of unorthodox or embarrassing behavior” or “embarrassing conduct.”

We were meant to believe the Russians, across decades of dirt-digging, had an emptykompromat file on Hillary Clinton, to say nothing of human tabloid headline Bill Clinton? This point was made more than once in the reports, as if being emphasized for the reading public.

Taibbi doesn’t leave out criticism of politicians who have pushed Russiagate relentlessly:

But here was Schiff, telling the world Trump aide Carter Page had been offered huge fees on a 19% stake in Rosneft – a company with a $63 billion market capitalization – in a secret meeting with a Russian oligarch who was also said to be “a KGB agent and close friend of Putin’s.”

(Schiff meant “FSB agent.” The inability of #Russiagaters to remember Russia is not the Soviet Union became increasingly maddening over time. Donna Brazile still hasn’t deleted her tweet about how “The Communists are now dictating the terms of the debate.” )

Schiff’s speech raised questions. Do we no longer have to worry about getting accusations right if the subject is tied to Russiagate? What if Page hadn’t done any of these things? To date, he hasn’t been charged with anything. Shouldn’t a member of congress worry about this?

Taibbi also addresses a common accusation made at DK about “right-wing sources” for news reporting problems with the Russiagate narrative:

When Michael Cohen testified before congress and denied under oath ever being in Prague, it was the same. Few commercial news outlets bothered to take note of the implications this had for their previous reports. Would a man clinging to a plea deal lie to congress on national television about this issue?

There was a CNN story, but the rest of the coverage was all in conservative outlets – the National Review, Fox, The Daily Caller. The Washington Post’s response was to run an editorial sneering at “How conservative media downplayed Michael Cohen’s testimony.”

Finally, Taibbi returns to the conduct of the press and the implications for press credibility in the future, especially when it comes to Trump:

This has been a consistent pattern throughout #Russiagate. Step one: salacious headline. Step two, days or weeks later: news emerges the story is shakier than first believed. Step three (in the best case) involves the story being walked back or retracted by the same publication.

That’s been rare. More often, when explosive #Russiagate headlines go sideways, the original outlets simply ignore the new development, leaving the “retraction” process to conservative outlets that don’t reach the original audiences.

This is a major structural flaw of the new fully-divided media landscape in which Republican media covers Democratic corruption and Democratic media covers Republican corruption. If neither “side” feels the need to disclose its own errors and inconsistencies, mistakes accumulate quickly.

The Rolling Stone includes a story about David Corn, the reporter who wrote one of the first pieces on Russiagate and has ridden the story hard ever since:

I knew David a little and had been friendly with him. He once hosted a book event for me in Washington. In the program, however, the subject of getting facts right came up and Corn said this was not a time for reporters to be picking nits:

So Democrats getting overeager, overenthusiastic, stating things that may not be [unintelligible] true…? Well, tell me a political issue where that doesn’t happen. I think that’s looking at the wrong end of the telescope.

I wrote him later and suggested that since we’re in the press, and not really about anything except avoiding “things that may not be true,” maybe we had different responsibilities than “Democrats”? He wrote back:

Feel free to police the Trump opposition. But on the list of shit that needs to be covered these days, that’s just not high on my personal list.

For Corn, it wasn’t truth or facts that matters, but getting Trump. That approach to journalism will always end up betraying both the truth and the readers.

Taibbi is one a last real reporters out there. He was not a Russiagate skeptic early on, though he urged caution and suggested a focus on facts rather than speculation. With the conclusion of the Mueller investigation, he has provided us with a thorough discussion of the history of Russiagate and its players along with some trenchant observations about the further erosion of credibility for the MSM and politicians.

The piece is definitely long form, but if you’re someone whose assumptions and trust have been challenged by the Mueller investigation misfire, Taibbi’s piece is a good place to start to gain another, non-Fox News view of what has been happening the last two years.

===

The attacks on Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from the far right—and some centrist establishment Democrats as well—have ranged from hysterical to downright silly. And all of this silliness, Rolling Stone’s irreverent Matt Taibbi asserts in his latest article, shows how threatened they are by the 29-year-old congresswoman.

“The real problem most of Washington has with AOC,” Taibbi writes, is that “her self-generated popularity and large social media presence means she doesn’t need to ask anyone’s permission to say anything.”

Taibbi explains that if the New Yorker’s critics “were smart, they’d ignore her”—and the more this “ongoing freakout over newcomer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez” occurs, Taibbi stresses, the more pathetic those detractors show themselves to be.

“All of AOC’s supporters sent her to Washington precisely to make noise,” Taibbi explains. “There isn’t a cabal of key donors standing behind her, cringing every time she talks about the Pentagon budget. She is there to be a pain in the ass, and it’s working. Virtually the entire spectrum of Washington officialdom has responded to her with horror and anguish.”

One of the Ocasio-Cortez critics Taibbi takes aim at is former Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman, who complained that if she is the Democratic Party’s “new face,” Democrats can forget about having a “bright future.”

Taibbi writes, “How many Democrats, do you think, heard that and immediately thought the opposite—that if Joe Lieberman disapproves, Ocasio-Cortez must be on the right track? Sixty percent? Seventy?”

Taibbi notes that because Ocasio-Cortez is new to Congress, it remains to be seen how much she will accomplish on the job. But the fact that many establishment figures in Washington, DC feel so threatened by Ocasio-Cortez, according to Taibbi, speaks quite well of her.

“I have no idea if Ocasio-Cortez will or will not end up being a great politician,” Taibbi asserts. “But it’s abundantly clear that her mere presence is unmasking many, if not most, of the worst and most tired Shibboleths of the capital.”

===

Nobody covered the Wall Street collapse, bailout, and corrupt resurgence better than Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi, from giving Goldman Sachs its unforgettable epithet to covering the hearings on the bailouts to documenting the foreclosure mills, to deep dives into the sweetheart dealsthe banks got; to the revolving door between finance regulators and the finance sector to the rise of Occupy; to the consolidation of financial primacy after the collapse; to the double-standard for criminal justice revealed by the collapse; to the frauds that surfaced after the crash; to the tiny bright spots where bankers were brought to justice; all capped by an incandescent, outstanding book about the crisis and the systematic racial and economic justice it revealed.

Tomorrow is the tenth anniversary of the collapse of 2008, and in the intervening decade, Big Finance has gotten bigger, bankers' bonuses have gotten larger, and we are barreling toward another debt crisis that will make 2008 look like a kid's birthday party.

Writing in Rolling Stone, Taibbi lays out the decade's sordid history: the way that Obama's malpractice gave the banks more power, made the rich much richer, paved the way for a donor class that owns politics so thoroughly that they were able to buy themselves trillions in tax-breaks (with more to come).

No one makes this subject more accessible than Taibbi. We are still reaping 2008's whirlwind. Read this today, think about it tomorrow, then register to vote and do something about it. If you've got $20 to spare (or better yet, $200), back the kinds of candidates who will do something about it.

If Trump has you outraged, read this. It is his secret origin story, the sordid tale of how the country came to vote for a man so manifestly incompetent: because rich people spent what it took to convince racists to elect him.

An argument is frequently put forth that the government made a huge profit on the bailouts. This is an impossible stance to counter. It’s like trying to quantify how plaid something is.

Sure, in an environment in which the chief bailout recipients were allowed virtually limitless access to free capital; affirmatively non-prosecuted for severe regulatory violations (like rigging electricity prices or laundering money for drug cartels); repeatedly saved from crippling litigation by sweetheart settlements; and allowed to get financially well again overnight by feasting on direct cash injections, richly priced government-backed mortgages and other monster subsidies like the Quantitative Easing (QE) program… yes, in that universe, the bailout “earned” a profit. But for whom?

The real effect of the deal made that weekend has been a radical transformation of the economy. Previously, small banks traditionally enjoyed a lending advantage because of their on-the-ground relationships with local businesses. But the effective merger of the state with giant, too-big-to-fail banks has tilted the advantage far in the other direction.

Big banks post-2008 could now borrow much more cheaply than smaller ones, because lenders no longer worried about them going out of business. Some studies describe this “implicit guarantee” as a subsidy worth billions a year.

In 2012, Bloomberg put the number at $83 billion for just the top 10 banks. Fast-forward to last year. How much of the record $171.3 billion in profits earned by banks in 2017 was owed to the implicit guarantee?

Matt Taibbi on the 10-Year Anniversary of the Crash [Matt Taibbi/Rolling Stone]

BANK-STATE MERGER / BANKSTERS / BUSINESS / DEBT / ECONOMICS / FACE HUGGING VAMPIRE SQUID / FINANCE / GRAEBER / OCCUPY / PARTY LIKE ITS 2008 / PIKETTI / SUBPRIME / TAIBBI / THANKS OBAMA

ref no lnx many

SEPTEMBER 13, 2018 2:08PM ET

Ten Years After the Crash, We’ve Learned Nothing

The great financial catastrophe of our times is still badly misunderstood, and led to grotesque consequences, including the election of Donald Trump

By MATT TAIBBI

NEW YORK - SEPTEMBER 16:

Ten years ago, on Saturday, September 13th, 2008, the world was about to end.

The New York Federal Reserve was a zoo. Imagine NASA headquarters on the day a giant asteroid careens into the atmosphere. That was the New York Fed: all hands on deck, peak human panic.

The crowd included future Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, then-Treasury Secretary (and former Goldman Sachs CEO) Hank Paulson, the representatives of multiple regulatory offices, and the CEOs of virtually every major bank in New York, each toting armies of bean counters and bankers.

The asteroid metaphor fit. In the twin collapses of top-five investment bank Lehman Brothers and insurance giant AIG, Wall Street saw a civilization-imperiling ball of debt hurtling its way.

The legend of that meeting, as immortalized in hagiographic reconstructions like Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Too Big to Fail, is that the tough-minded bank honchos found a way to scrape up just enough cash to steer the debt-comet off course.

In Too Big To Fail, the “superstar” chief of Goldman, Lloyd Blankfein, along with “smart” Jamie Dimon of Chase, “fighter” John Mack of Morgan Stanley, and other titans brokered the deal of deals, just in time to stave off a Mad Max scenario for us all.

The plan included a federal bailout of incompetent AIG, along with key mergers – Bank of America buying Merrill, Barclays swallowing the sinking hull of Lehman, etc.

With respect to the fine actors in the film, the legend is bull.

There are more accurate chronicles of the crisis period, including the just-released Financial Exposure by Elise Bean of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, probably the most aggressive crew of financial detectives who sifted through the rubble over the past 10 years. Bean’s account of what went on at banks like Goldman, HSBC, UBS and Washington Mutual is terrifying to read even now.

But history is written by the victors, and the banks that blew up the economy are somehow still winning the narrative. Persistent propaganda about what happened 10 years ago not only continues to warp news coverage, but contributed to a wide array of political consequences, including the election of Donald Trump.

The most persistent myths about 2008:

Myth#1: The crash was an accident

In the early days of the crash, reporters were told the crisis particulars were probably too complex for news audiences. But metaphors would do. And the operating metaphor for 2008 was a “thousand-year flood,” a rare and inexplicable accident – something that just sort of happened.

It was even implied that the meltdown was due in part to irrational panic, “hysteria,” a fear of fear itself. When Lehman Brothers failed, the theory held, investors overreacted by freezing all lending, causing more disruptions and more losses. The economy was basically healthy, but fear had caused it to founder on a lack of confidence.

In Too Big to Fail, William Hurt plays Treasury Secretary Paulson as a saddened, wearied Atlas. He quips, early in the mess: “This is a confidence game,” and if Lehman Brothers failed, “all the other banks are gonna drop like dominoes.”

Poor Cynthia Nixon, who plays Treasury spokesperson Michele Davis, is heard responding, “Congress won’t move until we’ve already hit the iceberg.”

The film flashes to Lehman’s Dick “The Gorilla“ Fuld (played by James Woods in kinetic perma-jerk mode), who contrasts their fears with his overconfident weather report:

“Real estate always comes back,” he snorts, smugly fixing his tux. “I’ve seen this before. CEOs panic and they sell out cheap… The street’s running around with its hair on fire, but the storm always passes.”

This colorful language – dominoes, a confidence game, an “iceberg,” a “storm” – artfully disguised reality. This wasn’t weather coming at them, but the consequences of years of untrammeled criminal fraud.

Banks like Lehman had lent billions to fly-by-night mortgage mills like Countrywide and New Century. Those firms in turn sent hordes of loan hustlers into lower-income neighborhoods offering magical deals to anyone who could “fog a mirror,” as former Countrywide executive Michael Winston once put it to me. The targets were frequently minorities and the elderly.

Tales of mortgage swindlers guzzling Red Bulls and handing out easy loans in all directions began showing up in news reports as early as 2005. “It was like a boiler room,” one agent told the Los Angeles Times. “You produce, you make a lot of money… There’s no real compassion or understanding of the position they’re putting their customers in.”

These mortgage mills dispensed with due diligence, rarely bothering to verify incomes, identification, even citizenship. The loans were designed to have short, fragile lives, like fruit flies. They had to stay viable just long enough to be sent back to Wall Street and resold to secondary buyers, who took the losses.

It was a classic Ponzi scheme. So long as new loans were created and sold faster than the old ones failed, the subprime market made everyone rich. But the minute the market started to swing back the other way, everyone knew they would all crash to earth, Wile E. Coyote-style.

Paulson knew as well as anyone. Treasury and the other regulators received ample warning. Take the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS), a regulatory arm of Treasury that happened to oversee two of the worst basket-cases, Washington Mutual and AIG. According to Bean, the OTS observed and ignored more than 500 deficiencies in mortgage practices just at WaMu in the years before the crash.

Even the FBI – not exactly an on-the-ball financial regulator, certainly not to the degree that Treasury or the Fed is expected to be – had warned as far back as 2004 that so-called “liar’s loans” were “epidemic” and would cause a “financial crisis” if not addressed.

CNN told the public of the FBI warning of a “next S&L crisis,” going so far as to identify the top 10 “hot spots’ for mortgage fraud” in: Georgia, South Carolina, Florida, Michigan, Illinois, Missouri, California, Nevada, Utah and Colorado.

All places that would later be rocked by mass foreclosures.

It took longer to get a car wash than a home loan in those days. I had one mortgage broker in Florida tell me he used to look for customers on the way home from work at night, at the beer cooler at his neighborhood 7-Eleven. His pitch was, “Hey, buddy, you like where you’re living?”

The end of this party was no confidence game. This was gravity: what went way up, coming way down.

The captain of the Titanic ignored one day’s worth of iceberg warnings and went down in history as an all-time schmuck for it. History commends him only for the honorable act of going down with his ship.

The titans of Wall Street ignored at least four years of warnings, escaped richer than ever, and in the end were lauded as heroes by the likes of Sorkin.

Myth #2: The crash was caused by greedy homeowners

Too Big To Fail shows Fuld on a rant:

“People act like we’re crack dealers,” Fuld (James Woods) gripes. “Nobody put a gun to anybody’s head and said, ‘Hey, nimrod, buy a house you can’t afford. And you know what? While you’re at it, put a line of credit on that baby and buy yourself a boat.”

This argument is the Wall Street equivalent of Reagan’s famous Cadillac-driving “welfare queen” spiel, which today is universally recognized as asinine race rhetoric.

Were there masses of people pre-2008 buying houses they couldn’t afford? Hell yes. Were some of them speculators or “flippers” who were trying to game the bubble for profit? Sure.

Most weren’t like that – most were ordinary working people, or, worse, elderly folks encouraged to refinance and use their houses as ATMs– but there were some flippers in there, sure.

People pointing the finger at homeowners are asking the wrong questions. The right question is, why didn’t the Fulds of the world care if those “nimrods” couldn’t afford their loans?

The answer is, the game had nothing to do with whether or not the homeowner could pay. The homeowner was not the real mark. The real suckers were institutional customers like pensions, hedge funds and insurance companies, who invested in these mortgages.

If you had a retirement fund and woke up one day in 2009 to see you’d lost 30 percent of your life savings, you were the mark. Ordinary Americans had their remaining cash in houses and retirement plans, and the subprime scheme was designed to suck the value out of both places, into the coffers of a few giant banks.

A blizzard of post-2008 lawsuits involving pension funds testifies to this. One State Street fund lost 28 percent of its value. Plaintiffs like the Iowa Public Employees’ Union or an Electrical Workers’ Union in Illinois or even the Zuni Native American tribe in Arizona and New Mexico all lost millions because of mortgage investments.

Bean’s report makes it clear that when Senate investigators started to look through the records, they found that not only the companies themselves, but even their regulators saw the entire outlines of this con from the start.

“Other materials showed OTS supervisors downplaying the risk,” she writes, “highlighting bank profits and the speed with which banks sold the high-risk loans to Wall Street.”

In other words, nobody cared if the loans were shoddy. They were selling like hotcakes, generating lots of cash. Party on!

To this day, you’ll find people pushing the line that the crash was caused because Congress “forced everybody to go and give mortgages to people who were on the cusp.”

But nobody pushed banks to do anything. Homeowners were necessary parts of the scam. They were the straw in the Rumpelstiltskin scheme. If the Countrywides of the world had been worried about borrowers’ ability to pay, they would have, you know, checked.

It was a hot-potato game. Get a name on a piece of paper, then toss the loan from buyer to buyer until you found someone unsophisticated enough to take it.

All that brainpower in the New York Fed 10 years ago was searching for new takers for hot potatoes. They got the taxpayer to buy a lot, and got the Fed to buy more. They even used Fannie and Freddie as a backdoor bailout mechanism, buying up still more toxic assets. The banks themselves were the only ones who refused to take losses.

Myth #3: The bailouts were about saving capitalism

The deal those bankers cooked up was to save the banks from capitalism.

Losers must be allowed to lose. It’s the first and most important regulatory mechanism in a market economy.

But by 2008, the banks had simply grown too big and interconnected to allow normal market processes to take place.

These firms almost certainly would have died without help. In 2011, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission released a report quoting then-Fed chief Ben Bernanke as saying this about that fateful week in September 2008:

“Out of maybe the 13, 13 of the most important financial institutions in the United States, 12 were at risk of failure within a period of a week or two…”

Again, the legend is that the banks at the Fed that weekend were the healthy ones, saving us from the contagion of AIG and Lehman. This legend has been reinforced by constant propaganda about the banks being “forced” to accept bailouts like the TARP.

It’s a lie. Paulson and the other regulators repeatedly intervened to prevent the natural demises of these firms.

It wasn’t just small market-stopping moves, like when they banned short-selling to protect corrupt companies from smaller gamblers who’d wagered on their failure. Or the deal made on September 19th, 2008, when two companies that were not commercial banks, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, were given emergency commercial bank charters on a Sunday night, allowing the two plummeting giants access to lifesaving Fed cash the next morning.

The public to this day has no understanding of the scale of the intervention.

To put it in perspective, the War on Terror has cost America about $5.6 trillion since 9/11, or about $32 million an hour.

The bailouts probably dwarf that effort. Most studies suggest it was a world-war-level mobilization of cash, a generation of savings used to plug a single hole.

The Special Inspector General of the TARP put the gross government outlay at $4.6 trillion, with over $16 trillion in guarantees. Bloomberg concluded the rescue expenditure was $12.8 trillion. Fortune (which saluted the investment as hugely profitable for America in the end) put the number at $14 trillion. The Levy Institute at Bard College did probably the most extensive study, and put the number at $29 trillion.

An argument is frequently put forth that the government made a huge profit on the bailouts. This is an impossible stance to counter. It’s like trying to quantify how plaid something is.

Sure, in an environment in which the chief bailout recipients were allowed virtually limitless access to free capital; affirmatively non-prosecuted for severe regulatory violations (like rigging electricity prices or laundering money for drug cartels); repeatedly saved from crippling litigation by sweetheart settlements; and allowed to get financially well again overnight by feasting on direct cash injections, richly priced government-backed mortgages and other monster subsidies like the Quantitative Easing (QE) program… yes, in that universe, the bailout “earned” a profit. But for whom?

(l-r) U S Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox Prepare to Testify On the Federal Economic Bailout Plan Before the Senate Banking Committee On Capitol Hill in Washington Dc Usa On 23 September 2008 the Bush Administration and Congressional Democrats Are Arguing Over the Terms of a 700 Billion Dollar Government Bailout Plan to Rescue Financial InstitutionsUsa Senate Economy - Sep 2008

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The real effect of the deal made that weekend has been a radical transformation of the economy.Previously, small banks traditionally enjoyed a lending advantage because of their on-the-ground relationships with local businesses. But the effective merger of the state with giant, too-big-to-fail banks has tilted the advantage far in the other direction.

Big banks post-2008 could now borrow much more cheaply than smaller ones, because lenders no longer worried about them going out of business. Some studies describe this “implicit guarantee” as a subsidy worth billions a year.

In 2012, Bloomberg put the number at $83 billion for just the top 10 banks. Fast-forward to last year. How much of the record $171.3 billion in profits earned by banks in 2017 was owed to the implicit guarantee?

The bank-state merger brokered 10 years ago this week socialized the risks of the financial sector, and essentially converted Wall Street into a vehicle for annually privatizing a big chunk of America’s GDP into the hands of a few executives. The same people who were minutes from being (deservedly) destitute 10 years ago are now a permanent aristocracy.

Just look at the numbers. The average finance-sector salary last year was over $375,000, or five times the rate of the rest of the private sector. While the rest of the economy mostly ran in place, just the average Wall Street bonus grew 17 percent in 2017, to $184,220, or about three times the median income for an American household.

The companies enjoy a vast smorgasbord of seen and unseen subsidies, even earning interest on their reserve capital (a trillion-dollar perk the Fed gave them after the crash, essentially paying banks to be banks). Most of the biggest banks pay little to no tax, a serious problem Trump has made worse.

The “merger” committed the governments of Europe and America to unwavering overt and covert support of the finance sector. Scandals of worsening gravity kept popping up after 2008 – from the flash crash to LIBOR to HSBC’s $850 million drug money-laundering fiasco – and regulators kept quietly making them go away. Just like actual aristocrats, employees of these firms do not go to jail, even for serious crimes they admit committing.

The crisis response dramatically accelerated two huge problems. First, we made Too Big To Fail worse by making the companies even bigger and more dangerous, through the supposedly ingenious litany of state-aided mergers arranged 10 years ago this weekend. Wells Fargo is bigger, Chase is bigger, Bank of America is way bigger. In the next crisis, letting losers lose will be even more unimaginable.

Secondly, an already-serious economic inequality issue became formalized. The people responsible for the crisis weren’t just saved, but made beneficiaries of another decade of massive unearned profits. Thanks to zero-interest-rate lending and QE and other subsidies, they are making more money than ever, in the new failure-proof profession known as banking with a government guarantee.

One market analyst this week described the business model of too big to fail banks in the post-bailout era as being like Brewster’s Millions:

“People at Goldman and JPM,” he says, “many of them do not understand the real reason they’ve been making money hand over fist the last nine or 10 years. If you were running one of these places you would have to really try – like every day – to fuck it up. It would have to be your sole mission when you got up in the morning. Like, ‘I’m off to go fuck things up.’”

Restoring compensation levels was one of the first and most urgent priorities of the bailout. Bonuses on the street were back to normal within six months. Goldman, which needed billions in public funds, paid an astonishing $16.9 billion in compensation just a year after the crash, a company record.

Outside Manhattan, the pain was just starting. In 2008, 861,664 families lost their homes, and homeowners lost a breathtaking $3.3 trillion in home equity (coincidentally, this was the TARP inspector’s estimate for the entire net outlay of the bailout). By 2011, a full 11.6 million homeowners were underwater on their homes.

Out there, in foreclosure – er, flyover – country, the only way out of the crisis was a big hit. You either foreclosed and lost your credit rating forever, or you sold your home, usually the chief investment in your life, at a gigantic loss. But a major principle of the bailout is that the banks never had to take any losses at all. Not one cent.

In the Fed’s bailout facilities, which were specifically designed to absorb the bad loans infecting the economy, the state bought toxic inventory at par, i.e. at full price. Regulators, in other words, didn’t even make the banks take a discount for loans on their books that were a) worthless, and b) may have been created in furtherance of a criminal scheme.

Not only did the state cough up $173 billion to pay AIG’s counterparties in September 2008 – paying full price on billions’ worth of AIG swaps to Goldman and the other gambling banks – but the news later emerged that “rescued,” post-bailout AIG paid $450 million in bonuses to the employees of AIGFP, the tiny swaps unit that had nearly destroyed the universe with its insane mismanagement and greed.

In other words, everyone in the upper echelon of the finance community got Paid In Full in the bailout, even the exact people who screwed up the worst. But outside Manhattan? It was like Warren Buffet’s partner Charlie Munger sneered: People should just “suck it in and cope.”

The biggest victims in this miserable story turned out to be poor, nonwhite, and elderly. One of the main things the financial press missed in its countless crash post-mortems is that the subprime scam was significantly about race. In its particulars, it was really just a rehash of ancient race crimes like “contract selling,” a predatory white-on-black home loan scam from the Jim Crow days that often involved no money down, but severely punitive rates.

The housing rush similarly involved no-money-down “100%” mortgage deals, often given by rich banks to poor minorities. The most infamous example was probably Wells Fargo’s efforts to push toxic “ghetto loans” on “mud people” in Maryland.

The housing bubble devastated black and Latino homeowners, disproportionately to white counterparts. The James Woods/Dick Fuld remark about crack dealing wasn’t far off. Subprime blighted minority neighborhoods with similar speed and ferocity. Debt was the crack of the early 21st century. And we bailed out the dealers.

For years since, pundits have been scratching their heads over the rise of “populism,” wondering why the public refuses to accept seemingly obvious economic plans like austerity. The money’s gone. Don’t they understand that belts need to be tightened?

One of the head-scratchers was bailout architect Ben Bernanke, who in 2015 had the stones to publish a memoir called The Courage to Act (his protégé Geithner’s self-congratulatory tome was called Stress Test).

Despairing at what the Times described as the “messy maw of democracy,” Bernanke asked: Why did the public keep embracing the bombast of politicians like audit-the-Fed advocates Bernie Sanders and Ron Paul (who only wanted to know where all those trillions went), when it could just be trusting the “orderly, thoughtful decision-making” of the bailout architects?

After being similarly confused by a lack of public enthusiasm for his renomination, Bernanke decided to accept the advice of an unnamed senator, who essentially told him that sometimes, you just have to “throw some red meat to the knuckle-draggers.”

It was only after the public elected Donald Trump that Bernanke had an insight. He realized suddenly that “growth is not enough” (translation: the rich getting richer for eight straight years did not please voters).

Economists, he now said, may actually have a “responsibility” to address inequities in the economy, which he conceded might have been caused by a “proclivity toward top-down, rather than bottom-up, policies.”

Imagine how dense you’d have to be to need 10 years, and the election of Donald Trump, to realize this.

These are the people who got Trump elected. Popular media myths may insist otherwise, but people in charge have to be this clueless and arrogant in order for “Anyone but…” to have real ballot appeal.

“Anyone but” is what we got, and will get again, until someone gets serious about undoing the damage caused by that awful deal made 10 years ago this weekend.

Want more Rolling Stone?

https://www.c-span.org/video/?428727-1/depth-matt-taibbi

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-dumb-and-the-restless-20160107

http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2014/02/first-look-media-hires-matt-taibbi-183638.html

By HADAS GOLD |

2/20/14 7:59 AM EST

Pierre Omidyar's First Look Media has hired Matt Taibbi from Rolling Stone, the companyannouncedWednesday.

Taibbi, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone with an eponymous blog on its site, will head up a new publication focused on financial and political corruption. The still unnamed publication will be separate from The Intercept, the first publication from First Look Media, headed by former Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald.

"Matt is one of the most influential journalists of our time,” Eric Bates, executive editor of First Look Media, said in a statement. “His incisive explorations of the financial crisis — and Wall Street’s undue influence over our political system — have played a key role in helping to inform the public and transform the national debate. He is a journalist who can explain what a credit default swap is and why it’s important — and, make you bust out laughing while he’s doing it. I look forward to having him on our team and helping him launch a dynamic new site unlike any other.”

Taibbi's is the latest major journalist to join the new venture backed by e-Bay founder Omidyar. Along with Greenwald and Laura Poitras, the journalists who have published many of Edward Snowden's NSA leaks, First Look Media has picked up "Dirty Wars" author Jeremy Scahill; Peter Maass, who has written about war, media and national security for The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker and The Washington Post; Marcy Wheeler, an independent journalist who covers the legal side of counterterrorism programs; and Ryan Gallagher, a Scottish journalist who has written about government surveillance technologies for Slate, The Guardian and the Financial Times.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog

by MATT TAIBBI

DECEMBER 30, 2013

The holidays are a great time in politics. Every year it's the same: the minute the last bits of wrapping paper have been cleared away, and Grandpa has passed his last puff of holiday gas, you can always retreat to the inside pages of the news section and find some embarrassing/despicable PR fiasco that some politician somewhere has just tried to sneak past vacationing America.

This year was no different. In a fitting homage to past holiday-season embarrassments like the Iran-Contra pardons or Bill Clinton's signing of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, the Republican Party last week quietly declared war on itself, in the process essentially confessing to a generation of failed governance and dumbed-down politics.

The news came in the *Wall Street Journal*, where the Chamber of Commerce disclosed that it will be teaming up with Republican establishment leaders to spend $50 million in an effort to stem the tide of “fools” who have overwhelmed Republican ballots in recent seasons. Check out the language Chamber strategist Scott Reed used in announcing the new campaign:

Our No. 1 focus is to make sure, when it comes to the Senate, that we have no loser candidates… That will be our mantra: No fools on our ticket.

The blunt choice of words is no accident. All year long, as they’ve crept closer and closer to having to face the reality of a Ted Cruz presidential candidacy in 2016 (with Cruz maybe pickingrecently-redeemed *Duck Dynasty*star Phil Robertson as his more moderate running mate?), the Beltway’s Republican kingmakers have drifted into ever more alarmist language about the need to change course.

It’s been a transparent effort to reassure industry donors that the party's future isn't a bottomless pit of brainless Bachmanns and Cruzes and Santorums, all convinced our Harvard-educated president is a sleeper-cell Arab and that Satan is a literal being intent on conquering Nebraska with U.N. troops.

Earlier this month, for instance, former House Majority Leader and cause-betraying Tea Party progenitor Dick Armey complained that Republicans have been getting whipped at the polls because "we had a lot of candidates quite frankly that did dumb things out there." And way back in March of last year, Karl Rove himself, speaking on behalf of his Crossroads SuperPAC, told Fox News Sundaythat "our goal is to avoid having stupid candidates." Rove’s group is reportedly also involved in this new $50 million effort.

The Chamber's announcement was met with howls of outrage from Tea Party-friendly voices, who naturally took immediate offense to the prospect of boycotting "fools" from the political process.

"Misguided," said Chris Chocola, president of the Club for Growth. "Insane," sneered conservative activist Cleta Mitchell.

Tom Borelli, senior fellow for Armey’s old FreedomWorks group, quite correctly complained that the Chamber and their Republican allies were trying to defy the conservative base by hijacking the party and keeping it in the pocket of big-money interests. "The tea party is about lowering costs," Borelli explained to Newsmax. "[The Chamber will] want regulations to favor big business."