 Elon Musk spoon fed you his cherry-picked information, which you must have suspected promotes a slanted viewpoint, or at the very least, generates another right-wing conspiracy theory. This isn't just a matter of what data was given to these so-called journalists before us now. My name is Matt Taiibi. I'm not a so-called journalist. I've won the National Magazine Award, the I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism, and I've written 10 books, including four New York Times bestsellers. Before Matt Taiibi was sparring with Democratic members of Congress on Capitol Hill earlier this year over the Twitter files, he was a darling of the progressive left, appearing regularly on shows like Democracy Now, Bill Moyers, and Rachel Maddow. Matt Taiibi, his new article for Rolling Stone magazine, Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail? The Bush administration, these are some of the people, these are some of the greatest liars in the history of politics, and even they couldn't come up with a connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. Though he was always a fierce critic of the Democratic establishment, the rise of Donald Trump suddenly meant that anyone nominally left of center, even progressive journalists like Taiibi, were expected to support Hillary Clinton unconditionally. So when he attacked her as a sellout, argued that the Russiagate narrative was mostly bullshit, and equated the manipulative tactics of both right and left media personalities, he found himself cold-shouldered by progressives. And Democrats started treating him like a puppet for the right. Do you think it's a legitimate objective of the FBI to stop foreign interference in our elections? I think it's the legitimate objective to stop actual foreign interference. Okay, I don't know what the difference is, but that's fine. In 2020, Taiibi started publishing his work on Substack, and quickly became one of the platform's most popular writers, earning far more revenue than he ever did at Rolling Stone. You yourself posted on your, I guess it's kind of like a web page, and don't quite understand what Substack is, but... He became even more of a pariah by publishing exhaustive reports that documented extensive governmental interference seeking to control what was said on Twitter about COVID-19 and efforts by Russia to influence U.S. elections. Congressional Democrats pilloried him as a fake journalist, a Putin apologist, and a stooge for Elon Musk. That's quite obvious that you've profited from the Twitter files. I think it's probably a wash, honestly. No, then you consider Mr. Musk to be the direct source of all this. No, no, you're trying to get me to say that he is the source. I can't answer your question. He isn't. He's a journalist. No, he can't, because either Musk is the source and he can't talk about it, or Musk is not the source, and if Musk is not the source, then he can discuss his conversations with the source. No one has yielded the general ladies out of order. But he has said he's not going to reveal his source, and the fact that Democrats are pressuring him to do so is such an honor. Reason caught up with Taiibia at Freedom Fest, an annual gathering held this year in Memphis to talk about the new challenges to free speech, why legacy media is dying, and how identity politics are poisoning political discourse. Matt Taiibia, thanks for talking to me. It's so great to talk to you again, Nick. So let's talk about the Twitter files first. When you went into the kind of sealed room and things like that, what were you expecting to find? Not much. I went into the Twitter files with a very old school antiquated kind of First Amendment conception of what we might find or what questions we might answer. We discussed with Twitter's management the idea of focusing on the suppression of the Hunter Biden story, mainly because Mark Zuckerberg had given an interview and had testified before Congress in which he suggested that the FBI had tipped him off about that story. So I thought if there were those kinds of communications with Twitter, this might be where we found them. And I wanted to know what those communications look like. As we discovered there, we didn't find them in that case, but we found an enormous quantity of them elsewhere and it turned into a much more complicated story than I anticipated. Does the Twitter files really, is it the final nail in the coffin of the idea that there is a clean distinction between the government and the media? Because that kind of informed for a long time, if you think back to the Pentagon Papers or something, it's like the New York Times is separate from the government and it's not communicating in the way that it seemed like in the Twitter files, it's like there are tons of people at Twitter saying, hey, FBI or whatever, take a look at this and then various government actors are saying, hey, you really need to look at this and do something about it. I would say that it puts the final nail in the coffin of that narrative. I actually feel guilty for being naive about that. Again, I grew up in the media. My father was in television and I was around newsrooms, most of my childhood. The idea that the FBI might call up and say, hey, you might want to think about not doing this story, that would be crazy. I couldn't have even imagined an editor or a news director who would have even taken that call in that way. And we found in the Twitter files all kinds of things that suggested that this relationship was not only tolerated but that it was ongoing, regular and collusive in a way that was kind of shocking to me. What's a specific example of that? A great example of this was the Aspen Institute Tabletop Exercise, which was technically not set up by the government. It was set up by the Aspen Institute, which is funded by the government in collaboration with some academic institutions that had been briefed by the FEC and some government agencies. But they all got together before the release of the Hunter Biden story. They were briefed by current and former government officials who talked about the possibility that a hack and leak story involving Hunter Biden and Burisma might come out and they kind of war game the possibility of what to do about that story. And then a month later, that story happens. Now, for me, if I had been in that room and that story actually happened a month later, I would feel obligated to do a story about that Tabletop Exercise. I would say, hey, what a weird coincidence that this thing happened. But these people had an off-the-record arrangement with everybody they were in the room with and they kept to it, they kept quiet. And that's a completely new level of cooperation and coordination that I would never have imagined. I guess, did it work or did it not to suppress the story? Because this is a slightly different question. Was it a Streisand effect where the New York Post publishes something about Hunter Biden a couple of weeks before the election and people are like, yeah, it's the New York Post. But then I remember going to Twitter when I heard about it and then it was like you can't link to it from Twitter or anything. And that was really chilling. That was the first time I felt I was in an Orwell novel or something where it's like, what do you mean? You can't link to it or discuss it on Twitter. But do you think did it work first? And then let's talk about why they thought it might or might not have. I'm not sure. I think that would be worth studying. It would be interesting to do some surveys about that and find out what the actual impact of that was. I think overall in the long run, certainly that story got more attention than it would have absent this. However, we're also learning, I think there's more about that story that's going to come out fairly soon. My understanding is that there are some depositions that are underway, that there are things that are happening in Washington where some of those committees, oversight committees are still looking at that issue and the stuff that was on the laptop. Because we didn't know a whole lot when that first story came out. All we knew was that they found the laptop. They didn't know a whole lot about whether any of those emails were meaningful. All we knew is that we had some racy looking pictures. It was embarrassing. But it's going to take some hardcore investigation to find out whether there's anything behind that. And that process in many cases takes years. I would just say they probably were effective in installing that. Also, there's the alternate story where they told people in mainstream media that this was Russian disinformation. That was effective with Biden voters. That story had an effect in getting people to ignore the idea that this was anything worth paying attention to. You obviously started your career in Russia in the post-Soviet world. Was this kind of collusion between the government and news, was that taken for granted there? Are we looking like Russia in the late 90s or something? Like 1999, 2000, I think that was when you first started to see directly the news stations resembling basically press releases for the Kremlin. In the mid-to-late Yeltsin years, the press was sort of stratified and fractured. Each of the different news companies was basically backed by a different mob or mafia interest. They all had their own ties to Yeltsin, but basically you were looking at the point of view of this or that oligarch when you watch the news. When Putin came to power, one of the first things he did is he really consolidated the media landscape. He cracked down on companies like NTV, which is one of the last independent stations, and he got it so that there was basically no dissent in Russian media. It's beginning to feel a little bit like that. Although it's not because, if you dissent from Biden, you're going to start eating polonium without knowing it, right? What are the steps that are happening? It's not against the media's interest or against media actors. They're bringing it on, and Twitter and Facebook was filled with people who had been in an administration and then moved there to do communications or strategy, and it goes back and forth. How are we getting to a place where Twitter, its first big glory was in helping to kind of platform the Arab Spring? It was great because it was anti-government and it was anti-censorship, and now it's like doing the towel boy for a particular vision. I don't want to say the deep state, but of a centrist mainstream ideological politics. Yeah, I think that's right. There's obviously a huge difference between what happened in Russia. I knew people like Anna Polikowska, who got murdered under the Putin regime. There were a couple of others I knew who had some pretty unfortunate fates. Nobody's getting shot in their doorway in the United States, and that's actually one of the more depressing parts about our story is that this is all voluntary of what's going on. The overall, the overarching narrative that we collectively working on the Twitter files decided was happening, was that there was a huge infrastructure that had been built up for counter-proliferation, counter-terrorism within the government. It was aimed at the messaging apparatus of groups like ISIS to prevent the successful recruitment of white kids in suburban England and California. Well, when that threat dissipated, they moved over to populism in the United States because, as you say, Twitter, which had been this incredible force for anarchy and the irrepressible political urges of the population in the Arab Spring, it kind of came out again with Trump. Trump bypassed the ordinary media in 2016, and his amazing insight was that I can just use my own Twitter account and I'll have much more reach than all of these different stations combined. I think that freaked out a lot of people in power, and what we saw in the Twitter files essentially was a long period of rollback which they achieved through various different means. Did they do that? And I realize you may not be in a position to know, but did they do that against the wishes of people like Jack Dorsey and the top kind of creators of Twitter? Because there's one narrative that's going wrong in kind of social media companies. It's not the people at the top who started it, but it's like mid-level managers who are all like, you know what, we are good liberal slash progressives and we're really scared of America and so we are going to censor people and Dorsey and these other guys are kind of walking around the C-suite like Howard Hughes. And they're like, oh, we don't have any power. Who made these kind of operative decisions? It's funny, before the first Twitter files I had one fairly senior Twitter executive joke to me that Jack Dorsey was more like the company's spirit animal than its CEO. I had talked to Jack before. I like him. I think he's at heart, got a lot of sympathy for free speech principles. I think they're important to him. But if you look at the Twitter files you see that he's not in the loop of a lot of these key decisions. The things that happened, particularly around that one incident involving the Hunter Biden story, he was definitely not involved in that. One of the weird ways that I know about that is because I found, believe it or not, on my first day looking at the Twitter files that Jack Dorsey had forwarded to Vijaya God, the woman who was basically running things, one of my articles complaining about the censorship of that article. He was definitely a free speech advocate, but he really wasn't at the helm when they came to the decision to take Trump off the platform. I think he was dragged kicking and screaming to that decision, and most of the company was against him at that point. With the kind of Russiagate, the Russiagate narrative is that the Russians wanted, and correct me or massage this into what you believe, is that Russia was proactive. They wanted Trump to win, and more than that, it was also that the Trump campaign was actively working with them. Is that the hinge point of, we're going to look back, and there's media before 2016 and after? How did the Russiagate story spin out? There have been tons of congressional investigations and others, and they've really come up with nothing in terms of collusion. Why did it get started, and then why is it persisting after we got nothing, except a dream, a desire that it's true? Well, the Russiagate story, oddly enough, became involuntarily very important in my life personally. I think it's really the reason I ended up leaving mainstream media, where I was very happy. You had the job everybody wanted. Who doesn't want to be the campaign reporter for Rolling Stone Magazine? It's the coolest thing in the world. It's one of the iconic gigs you can have. But when the Russiagate story happened, as you mentioned, there were really two different storylines. One was that Russia had interfered somehow, and they had a couple of different inflection points that they were looking at. Then they were working with WikiLeaks and some other things. But the more important narrative that I thought they were pushing was this idea of collusion. I never saw anything that indicated anything like hard proof for that. At first, all I said, I wrote a couple of very gentle columns in the beginning saying, this looks a little bit like the WMD mistake, where we have an awful lot of anonymous state officials who are telling us things that we can't reproduce in the laboratory independently. There's no way to check this story. But everybody was going for it, and I think it's as simple as people thought everything was permitted in pursuit of getting rid of Donald Trump. There was a very influential article in The New York Times in August of 2016 called Trump is testing the norms of objectivity and journalism. The columnist Jim Rutenberg argued, we can't just be true anymore. We have to be true to history's judgment. That's also great where Trump was, it's just so weird, everybody's like, he is destroying norms. Therefore, we are going to throw over our norms preemptively to get rid of him. It's like, okay, yeah, whatever. It worked great in Iraq. Preemptive war against Trump has worked out pretty well. It's like they're incapable of learning anything from any of these mistakes. With the resurgent thing, it was like it was happening in slow motion the entire time. They kept stepping it at one story after another. Instead of walking it back or reexamining the evidence, they would double down. I realize this is asking a psychologist, but why were mainstream people, mostly it's kind of like liberal, centrist liberals, legacy media types. But also, I don't know, people in newer publications, they wanted that to be true. It was like, I'm old enough to remember reruns of I Dream of Jeannie, Freeze Company, where it's like every week Mr. Roper is finally going to catch Jack Tripper in a homosexual trist. It never happens. Dr. Bellos, this time he's got Tony down to rights. It never happened, and you would think 15 times in, you'd be like, let's write a different plot. Right, exactly. We still enjoy the show, though. Yeah, that's true. And they're still doing it, right? They are still doing it. If you go back and look, you can see why it was compelling television. You can see why MSNBC shot to the top of the ratings for the first time in 20 years. This looked like the end of the world. This was the Millerite prediction of the world was going to come to an end and it was going to happen on live TV and you better not turn it off, because it might happen while we're on the air. They would even do, if you watch the tosses between one show to another, they would sort of guide you from one show to the next and warn you that you better not turn the dial because between Lawrence O'Donnell and Rachel, it might happen. And this was very compelling TV. I understand why they did it, but the problem was you were setting yourself up. You were writing checks that you were going to have to cash at some point and that's a very dangerous place to be. One of the things I always liked about journalism is that when you're done with the story, it's done. You go to sleep and you don't have to think about it anymore. This thing was like the sort of Damocles hanging over the whole business and I don't understand what people were thinking. I know a lot of the old-timers were very worried about it. But they're kind of all gone. They're all gone, exactly. What's interesting is that Russiagate was primarily among liberals. None of this is true, but during the Cold War the conservatives were the real Americans and they understood that the Soviet Union by extension the Russian people were evil and you can't really do business with evil. And the liberals were more like, no, we have to work peacefully. And now it's weird because it's liberals who are like Russia, Russia, Russia, like they're evil. And now we have conservatives who are like, give Putin a chance or something. How do you explain these weird flips? It's like every million years or something that North and South Pole flip. But then it feels like, okay, it's always been this way. Where is that coming from? Well, I originally thought it was because I had gone crazy. That something was wrong with me personally. I think that was a common experience of a lot of people. It must be me. This must all make sense somewhere outside of my understanding. But if you look back, I can't remember which one of them said it. I feel like it's either Jim Clapper or Ted Liu. But there was a prominent politician who said something like, the Russian is genetically predisposed to sieve or something like that. This was a comment a politician made and it flew all over social media and it wasn't condemned. It was sort of upheld. And again, as you say, back in the Soviet days, one of the principle liberal ideas was that the Russian person is not guilty. It's their leader. It was the Sting song. It was the children too. That was Sting. Richard Pryor said, if you don't have that hat on, the Russians don't have the hat on. I don't know who the fuck he is. They're just people just like us. That all went out the window when this started. And why? I have no idea. Let's talk a little bit about leaving Rolling Stone. When did you leave exactly? I guess I left in 2019. And you went to Substack immediately. You were one of the original people, which also was fascinating when Substack started and then when it came out they were paying some people. Then there was, again, from kind of legacy media or like cub reporters who were pissed they weren't getting 200 grand advances were like, that's wrong. Why should people be paid to do independent journalism? It was bizarre. But what led to the rupture with Rolling Stone? What a great position to be in. It's a coveted slot, Rolling Stone. It started in 1967, but it quickly became like mainstream publication, mainstream journalism. What led to the rupture there? First of all, I love Rolling Stone. I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for it. I think it had a couple of really long heydays where it did unbelievable work. It was great as music journalism for a long time. It was innovative in bringing Hunter Thompson's style of writing to political journalism, and I think that's become iconic now, right? They brought PGR work in. Then when I was there in the early 2000s and mid-2000s, the owner, Jan Winner, was absolutely against a lot of the stuff that I wrote because I was reporting on financial corruption that didn't look good for the Democratic Party sometimes. But he was cool with it. That was a rare thing. In journalism, it's not often when your boss says, I hate this, but go for it. That's what makes a magazine great. But that started to change. After Trump, everybody's tolerance for exploring different points of view dried up. I didn't leave because I was pressured or pushed out the door. It was really more that I had a sense that there was something more lucrative and more rewarding out there on the independent front. Are you making more money on Subsect than you were for Rolling Stone? A lot more, yes. And you say how much more? I don't want to say. Make us all feel bad, not just me, but the camera guys. Let's just say that I'm making many times over more than I was making at Rolling Stone. What accounts for that? Part of it is Substack. The code they cracked was allowing people to be able to easily monetize an audience. But how do you account for the idea? Basically what you showed, and I think Matt Iglesias leaving Vox has done this. I think Glenn Greenwald, it's interesting since he started The Intercept and then was like, God, I hate this place. And the feelings were mutual. But when you get to a place where a writer like you somehow, if you're making, I don't know, five times what you were making at Rolling Stone, you were carrying a ton of people at Rolling Stone. What's the appeal, do you think? Like for you, unbound? Well, there was a couple of things. One, any writer who's ever worked for editors, and I've benefited massively from the editors I had, like Will Dana, Eric Bates. I had great editors at Rolling Stone. And I would never say that they're bad for a writer. But there is something to be said for when you turn 50 and you want to write what you want to write about, and there's nobody to say no. That feels pretty good. And sometimes that comes out in the writing, too, by the way. Are you edited now or is it like, I mean, or just copy-editing or something? Yeah, we do copy-editing. Sometimes we do fact-checking. It depends on what kind of piece it is. Because I mean, I'm 10 years older, I think, than you are roughly. So I get that. But it's also, as an editor, I like, yeah, you know, my best work was done when I had to explain myself to a pre-reader on some level. Right, right. There is some of that. You know, I mean, like, on one level, yes, I would love to be working with an editor. But A, it's an expense. B, there's a speed element now to internet publishing that is new. Even the delay of an hour can be consequential in how well a piece does. And that's different. How do you describe your audience? Like, you know, your sub-stack subscribers, like, can you give kind of a psychographic of them? What, you know, who are the people who are reading you and paying you, you know, gratefully out of their own pockets, you know, tons of dollars? Yeah, so my overall list, which includes the non-paying people, I mean, it's, you know, it's around 400,000, 400 something thousand subscribers now. And it's funny, originally, I would say they were all sort of center-lefty people who knew me from Rolling Stone. But now, this is a very diverse audience that I have. I have hardcore Trump supporters. I have lots and lots of independents who are like disaffected hippies from the 60s who are full of, you know, anger about what's happened to the Democratic Party. I have libertarians. I have people who, you know, have never been a part of any political movement. It's really interesting, actually, because at Rolling Stone, my audience was relatively homogenous. And that's not the case here. You mentioned Jan Wenner, you know, who is kind of like an archetypal baby boomer, right? And on late 60s boomer, who among other things was, you know, one of those guys who, you know, is like, I'm in favor of free speech, no matter what. One of your most recent pieces, you know, and like if you read the headlines of your subsects of, like one is where have all the liberals gone, another is get off the First Amendment's lawn, why Julian Assange must be freed, the elite war on free thought. Like something has happened among people who broadly call themselves liberals or progressives, where generationally, up through probably Gen X, that was like, if not the most important issue, like free speech uber alas, then it was like in the top three. For younger people, maybe it doesn't seem to be as important. Do you agree with that? And if so, what do you think has shifted that younger people who are liberal and progressive may have the exact same political commitments as you, or like free speech is more of a problem than it is a solution? I'm less in tune with what's going on with people who are under 30 and... How old are you right now? I'm 53. Okay. Yeah. In my generation growing up, I didn't know anybody who wasn't relatively a free speech absolutist. Right. Everybody I knew supported Frank Zappa and Dee Snyder against the Parents Music Resource Center. We were all in favor of NWA when they, you know, every one of those controversies that you knew were... Yeah, two live crew. Yeah. Two live crew, even the tape delay for Richard Pryor when he went on Saturday Night Live, right? Stuff like that. It was automatic. It was a defining issue for a generation. But there, I think, has been a schism, you know, within former liberals. It's clear to me between boomers and Gen Xers like me. You know, I mean, you brought up Jan Wenner. There was actually a moment at Rolling Stone that I think was kind of significant, where in the primary season for 2016, Jan did a big official Rolling Stone editorial supporting Hillary Clinton. And I was a little bit shocked by that given the magazine's history. Yeah. And I went to Jan personally. I said, hey, would you mind if I wrote a dissenting editorial? And I wrote one in favor of Bernie. And Jan's whole idea there was that the world has changed since 1972. George McGovern got beat. We were wrong then. We have to win now. And winning is the most important thing. And so forget about idealism and all that stuff we cared about in the 60s and 70s and all that. I mean, I thought this is supposed to be a magazine for young people, theoretically. Right, right. Like, you know, how is that going to fly? But it did, you know. And I was a little bit surprised by the reaction to both my editorial and his. That's fascinating that he as a boomer is like, yeah, free speech. You know, we can leave it because clearly younger generations seem less enamored of that. And that's I mean, one of the things I think about people, you know, squarely on the progressive left like you, Tom Frank, Thomas Frank, Glenn Greenwald, et cetera, like you've all over the past few years have broken with identity politics. Can you talk a little bit about that? And again, in terms of policy commitments, I don't know that you're that different. But, you know, why don't identity politics resonate with you? I don't believe a lot of the identity politics that are being proffered by the current version of the Democratic Party are genuine. And my first experience with this, where I really, really thought about this was when I was following Bernie Sanders' campaign in 2016. And there was a moment in that campaign where he first started to really draw blood against Hillary. Right. You might remember it was like in February or late January of 2016. He was hammering her on her ties to Goldman Sachs and other banks. The New York Post, interestingly, did this publish this big list of all of her speech commitments. And it was kind of amazing. And she wouldn't release the transcripts, right? She wouldn't release the transcripts. But I mean, even the schedule was amazing. She was doing $300,000 in the morning and then flying to someplace and doing 400 grand. A good shod or something. Yeah, exactly. In her circle of the Bilderbergers or whatever. And they tried everything to hit back. And nothing worked until she said, if we break up the banks tomorrow, will that end racism? And Bernie was paralyzed by that. You know, Bernie's an old school. He's a real comedy. And I mean that where it's class and everything else is a distraction, right? That capitalists will use race in order to keep the workers from realizing now they're all on the same side. Well, I would say I almost wish he was that. Because Bernie also marched for a civil rights movement in the 60s. And he was terrified of the idea that he might be accused of racism. Right. It mortified him. And I think it really slowed his campaign down. Yeah. There was also that moment, I think it might have been in Seattle or something where he was almost literally pushed off the stage by a couple of black activists who were like, we need to be talking about racial concerns, not whatever he was talking about. Right. Not your class thing, whatever that is, right? And that was when they started to sort of demonize the white working class, right? Which is a brilliant strategic move. Also interestingly, it was the exact opposite of what the Clintons had done in the 90s. You know, the Clintons whole strategy was let's peel off a little bit of that white working class. And we feel their pain. We feel their pain, right? And that's, you know, they just got over the finish line doing that. And now they... So we can add to the sins of Hillary Clinton that she also injected identity politics. I think so. I think that was a conscious thing that they did, that they... Nothing was working for them. I mean, if you read those books, one of the books about the Hillary campaign, there's a hilarious chapter where they couldn't come up with a slogan because they didn't even know what they stood for. Like, they were toying with, it's her turn, you know? But this whole idea of identity politics being something that they could lord over somebody like Bernie who was legitimately an oppositional movement and who was drawing on the same anger that Trump was. It worked. It stopped them in his tracks. The, you know, let's talk a little bit about Julian Assange. Speaking of Hillary hated Julian Assange because she, among other things, felt embarrassed by him, you know, with the first big WikiLeaps dump from Chelsea Manning, you know, and on from that. How do you, how do you make sense of journalists who actually don't think that Julian Assange should be like free to walk the planet? I mean, it's stunning because these are always the same people are like, you know, the New York Times and the Washington Post were so brave, you know, pushing back against the Vietnam War or publishing the Pentagon papers. Yeah. And even publishing Assange at one point, right? I remember doing public service announcements with other journalists. I did one that was, you know, where everybody had to stand up and say, I am Bradley Manning. It was Bradley Manning back then. But there were a whole lot of people in the media business in that public service announcement because everybody at that time believed that, of course, this is right. You know, we're exposing war crimes. What could be wrong with that? Yeah. And there was no question that the files were true, like the information was accurate. Nobody had any, there's never been an issue of factuality. Not that I know of with WikiLeaks. There are some other ethical issues that I, you know, I think are legitimate, but with factuality, no. But the amazing thing about the reaction that journalists have had since the indictment is the total inability to see how this relates to the future of journalism. I mean, they're threatening this guy with 175 years in prison for doing basically the same thing that every national security journalist does every day. You know, they're talking about conspiracy to retain national defense information or obtaining national defense information. Well, that happens all the time. I mean, this stuff doesn't even have to be classified, but we hear classified things all the time when we do reporting. If that's going to be a crime, you can go to jail for 10 years for, and they're going to enforce that. How can you do reporting anymore? And everybody's all for it. Does that disappear if Trump disappears? I mean, is this all kind of an epiphenomenon of Trump is so uniquely awful and, you know, and you have people. Hunter Thompson, actually, I guess said this more with George W. Bush, but that like, you know, Nixon was bad. Nixon, you know, the scumbag of the universe was bad, but George W. Bush is really bad. And I mean, is it just, I mean, I don't know, is it like old manism or something where it's like Nixon was bad, but Trump is the end of the world. And I don't think it's a coincidence that the Obama administration didn't feel like it had reduced to indict Assange as much as they wanted to. But that after Trump got elected, ironically enough, it was Trump's own Justice Department that did it. But, you know, politically, there was a lot of support for that after this story in 2016 about, you know, WikiLeaks possibly working with the Russians. Again, legally, it doesn't matter because the case is about an earlier time period. People don't think that way anymore, though. But I think you're right. I think absent Trump, this wouldn't be happening. But will Trump ever go away then? Or is the threat of the next Trump enough to kind of, you know, keep huffing this type of anti-first amendment? Or like where free speech is negotiable now going forward? I think one of the main things, and we found in the Twitter files, was that if it's not Trump, it's something. There's always demon acts that they're warning audiences away from, and they always come up with a word that is sort of a non-negotiable code for threat. So it's anti-vaxxer, right? Or domestic violent extremist or insurrectionist or anything, you know, something along those lines. Trump, in that sense, I think has been an enormous boon to the intelligence services. They've been able to say, hey, if you code as somebody who sides with Trump, you know, essentially they've created what I like to call the sort of one villain theory of the universe, which is if you're on Trump's side, that means you're on Putin's side, which means you're also on Assad's side, you're on Orban's side, you're on the side of domestic violence. And G somehow will end up in that mix, too, right? Exactly. It's all connected, right? It's like an edible arrangement, right? I mean, you can just keep adding flavors or something. Yeah. And rationally, it's a crazy conspiracy theory, but they actually do denialist and ban and de-amplify people based on ideas like that. You know, we're talking in Memphis where Freedom Fest is, you're speaking there, RFK Junior, Robert F. Kennedy Junior is speaking. One of the things that's interesting about RFK, we've reasonous talked to him and we've critiqued him and all of this, but he self-consciously says he is following a lot of Trump's playbook. Like he, you know, he, I saw an interview with him where he said, you know, he misunderstood Trump's appeal. He was very anti-Trump, but like now he's starting to understand why people looked at Trump seriously and he wants to kind of grab some of that. But what, you know, what is going on? Like why do people like Trump and now RFK Junior, what are they giving to people that they're not getting out of traditional candidates? I don't think it's that big of a mystery. I mean, the very first time that I saw Trump in person, I remember having the thought 20 minutes into his speech, this is going to work. I mean, I didn't know if he was going to win, but what he was doing was scoring. You could feel it in the audience. And why was that? Well, America since 2008 especially had become incredibly dysfunctional. We had had a massive financial collapse where the elite and wealthy class had been completely bailed out when a lot of them should have gone to jail. And everybody else sort of paid the bill, including millions of people who got thrown out of their homes, you know, in some cases justifiably, but in some cases not. And you add that to the, you know, the ongoing wars in the Middle East. There were lots of vets and Trump's crowds, you know, who had gripes about all kinds of things. And Trump picked up on anger at institutional America that I think had a legitimate basis. If you've read Martin Garry's book, The Revolt of the Public, he predicted this before Trump came on the scene. And he said, people are going to be pissed about all these different things. And all it takes is somebody who is tuned into that. And my only concern about Trump was that he was going to promise a lot but not really deliver. He was going to be a fake reformer. So if somebody were to come along and be, you know, a real reformer, if they were actually going to try to do something about some of these things, that would probably have a lot of appeal to the public. Do you think RFK is that person? I think he's more honest than Donald Trump. I think, you know, the people that he surrounded himself with are real politicians. I think they actually care about a lot of these issues. Trump for me was a master at the appearance side of the game, right? He was just so good at visual politics and virality and all these things that people didn't understand very well back then. But he wasn't a policy walk. He wasn't staying up at night reading position papers. You know, with Kennedy, it's still unknown, I would say. You know, what House in the series is, what he's really up to. I think we have to get to know him a little bit better. He's also coming onto the scene post-COVID. And Trump occupied a weird space during COVID, right? Because it was kind of like, you know, I'm not going to tell you what to do. I have experts, but he was criticized for not implementing a single policy, which in the end may have been better. But then he also, you know, he did Operation Warp Speed, which actually worked to get vaccines out quickly. They didn't come before the election, which he's obviously still pissed about. But he's also kind of an anti-vaxxer. How if 2008 was a moment where like, okay, you know, American institutions, people are like, fuck it. These are not working for us. How much worse is it post-COVID, do you think? I think it's a lot worse post-COVID. COVID has added to the dynamic that 2008, Iraq. Yeah. WMDs, all that stuff. Even the 2000 election where we couldn't really decide. Yeah, that too, right? You add that on top of it. But COVID has a whole long list of things that have added to middle America's grievances, beginning with the fact that it increasingly looks like they lied to us about the origins of the disease for some pretty weak reasons, maybe. You know, they were trying to cover up some research they were doing. That's thing one, that's looking increasingly likely. At the very least, they excluded the possibility of that illegitimately. And used, I mean, that was where the government was telling Twitter and Facebook at all, like, don't run this stuff or squelch it. Right, exactly. Squelch that. And then there was this whole idea of tying anti-vaccine sentiment to anti-mandate sentiment. Right. And they consciously blurred the lines about that. There were a lot of people, I did a story about Loudoun County, Virginia, when the Republicans won the gubernatorial election there. And there were people there who were furious at the way they had been portrayed in the media as racists or anti-vaxxers. Really, they wanted their kids to go back to school because they had done their own research online. They found the kids weren't really at risk. And their kids weren't learning anything. And it was a burden on them personally, right? So there's a million things like this that have added to ordinary people's dissatisfaction. And again, with COVID, there's the additional complicating factor of kids being involved. People feel strongly that once there's something about their kids, they go... And it became clear pretty early on that kids were not affected. And yet they were the ones whose lives were most clearly upended by this, right, by lockdowns. Where are you on vaccines? Are you an anti-COVID vaxxer? Are you anti-mandate? Are you pro-mandate, pro-vaccine? I'm anti-mandate, for sure. And my wife's a doctor. I'm pretty reliably convinced that vaccines have been a good thing overall in the world. I'm not a scientist. This is one of the reasons why I stayed away from the stories, because this is not my area of expertise. But I do think lockdowns have been bad. I do think the press lied about the threat to kids. And I don't understand why they had to do that. I'm not so sure about the efficacy of vaccinating children at all. This recent Missouri v. Biden case involves some doctors who just said some very logical things. If there's any risk at all with this vaccine, even if it's infinitesimal, it's probably more than the risk of sending your kid to school. Because this thing doesn't really hurt kids. And they tossed them off Twitter for that, or they tossed them off Facebook for that. That's crazy, you know? And I think people see that as crazy. You know, the other big story that paralleled COVID and the lockdowns, obviously, was George Floyd and kind of racial reckoning and whatnot. You had, it was in 2019 when you were at the Eric Garner book? Yeah, 18, I think. Which is before the lockdown and things like that. Obviously, the George Floyd story was huge. And it was, again, it probably wouldn't have been as big if we weren't in lockdown and whatnot. But go back to Eric Garner, who was arrested for selling loose cigarettes in Staten Island and then died while the police were arresting him. Where do you think we are in terms of kind of criminal justice reform, as well as race relations? Are we better than 2019 or Eric Garner time? Or is it worse, or is it just kind of like an open wound that we never quite can close or heal? I don't know. I mean, I haven't spent a lot of time in the last couple of years looking at local policing. I did, for many years, spend a lot of time in the courts and doing sort of street reporting. The George Floyd summer was very frustrating for me personally because the big lesson that I came away from the George Floyd story was that broken windows policing had massively increased the number of contacts between the ordinary citizen and police, which in turn resulted in a lot of these situations going wrong and people dying. And the one thing that's fixable in this whole milieu is we can change that. We can change statistics based policing. We don't have to order people to stop, you know, 20 people a month or whatever it is. And it never came up. I mean, it was like it was purposely excluded from the Floyd problem. It didn't seem to be serving anybody's interests, right? Right. Everybody abstracted immediately to you're racist, you're not racist or something. It didn't have a tie to America's racist past, you know, the inherent tendency towards white supremacy. Now, there are obviously enormous racial overtones to police brutality. And I detailed a lot of them in, you know, my book. But it's only part of the picture. I mean, this is just the same thing as like Trump coverage. People picked one thing and that became the entire lens through which they looked at that story. And they ignored all these other shades of gray and complexities. And I think they left audiences less informed than they were before as a result. Part, to kind of wrap up, one of the things I find most interesting about your kind of post mainstream media output, and you've started a podcast where you talked with Walter Kern, the novelist. And a lot of what you're doing is you're talking about stuff like Mark Twain's The Man That Corrupted Hadley Berg or classic stories, American stories, et cetera. What's the goal there and what has the response been? Part of it is just because Walter Kern and I both like talking about books. We don't get to do it very much. We've decided to experiment. What would happen if we did that? And what we found is people are so tired of the relentless sort of binary nature of media these days. Team X versus Team Y, Team Blue versus Red, and it's divisive. It's anti-intellectual. You don't get to talk about anything interesting in these shows. It's always an argument, and it's a dumb argument that just never ends. I mean, this is the basis of Hate, Inc., your book about what's the subtitle, why today's media make us hate each other. Yeah, exactly. And I think it's kind of a bad product unless you have some kind of amazing breaking news that's about to come out. Why would you watch it? Because it makes you depressed. What we found is when we talked about these stories, we're getting into all these issues. And we're also finding that a lot of these old stories that may be dust-covered in people's imaginations, they're amazingly relevant today. The E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops has a lot of relevance to... Can you do a quick summary? What's the plot of that? The plot of that, the E.M. Forster imagined a world where people no longer had to do anything. They lived underground. Machines basically did everything for them. They were told that if they went outside, they would die immediately. There were legends about that. But one day, the machine starts to malfunction because the people who are taking care of the machine, they've started to die off. And so the thing has started to malfunction. And people slowly realize that they've been had that it's actually safe to go outside. And a lot of the legends they've been told to keep them afraid and keep them indoors and keep them from acting out on their own are fake. And that's very true of internet culture. I think a lot of us are captured by our neuroses now. We don't have as much face-to-face contact with people. It's very relevant today. And it was so much fun talking about that. And we got a great response from people who were saying, there's a whole world of thought out there that they're telling us doesn't exist anymore. But it is out there. And people are learning to enjoy it again. I think we're going to leave it there. Matt Taibbi, thanks for talking to me. Great. Thanks so much, Nick. Thank you.