Is Matt Taibbi a Right-Winger? (S3 Ep.4)

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Is Matt Taibbi a Right-Winger?"

Conversations With Coleman (S3 Ep.4), February 25, 2022
Guest: Matt Taibbi (journalist, author, podcaster)
Host: Coleman Hughes

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Episode Overview

This episode features a wide-ranging conversation between Coleman Hughes and Matt Taibbi. The primary themes are the transformation of media platforms (especially Substack), the dynamics of public health messaging during COVID-19, accusations of ideological shifts among journalists, censorship and free speech in both tech and politics, the perception and reality behind Trump's 2016 victory, and speculation about the origins of COVID-19. The discussion is candid, analytical, and at times personal, with both men reflecting on their principled stances and frustration with contemporary media and political narratives.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Matt Taibbi's Unconventional Background

[03:44–09:24]

• Born in New Jersey, grew up in a journalistic family but aspired to be a novelist, influenced by satirists like Gogol, Evelyn Waugh, and Joseph Heller.
• Spent over a decade in the former Soviet Union, participating in adventures like playing basketball in Mongolia and baseball in Moscow, bricklaying in Siberia, and learning Russian.
• This global exposure made Taibbi more skeptical and less insular, especially about American journalism and politics.
  • Quote: “When you spend a lot of time outside the United States, you realize how insular reporters are in America.” – Matt Taibbi [07:04]
• Lessons: Corruption and media manipulation are worldwide; U.S. exceptionalism is often just about scale, not substance.

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2. The Substack Revolution and Media Malaise

[09:24–14:22]

• Substack’s appeal lies in its transparency, lack of censorship, and its model of writer-reader relationships.
• Traditional media is criticized for predictable, ideologically filtered content; audiences increasingly resent being talked down to.
  • Quote: “They like to be treated like grownups. They like to be given the information and left to their own devices to decide what to do with it.” – Matt Taibbi [11:55]
• Substack’s limitation: It’s hard to monetize time-consuming, in-depth investigative journalism compared to serial opinion and commentary.

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3. Paternalism vs. Transparency in Public Health Messaging

[14:22–20:50]

• Coleman highlights the debate: Should public health officials be totally transparent, or massage the truth for “best outcomes?”
  • Example: Fauci admitting to shifting herd immunity targets based on perceived public readiness.
• Taibbi insists that honesty is essential; audiences resent being lied to and are more capable than elites assume.
  • Quote: “If you lie to them even once the game is over … they are never going to listen to you again.” – Matt Taibbi [16:32]
• Both critique the “white lies” that erode public trust, particularly among non-conformists.

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4. Elites’ Disconnect—Understanding Trump’s Rise

[20:50–27:42]

• Both acknowledge having been blindsided by Trump’s 2016 victory, blaming elite insularity and lack of contact with everyday Americans.
• Taibbi: Much mainstream media used polling without actual on-the-ground understanding; they missed complex factors behind Trump’s support.
  • Quote: “Most of these people had never met somebody who supported Donald Trump.” – Matt Taibbi [21:55]
• Trump’s election cannot be explained simply by a “racism spike”; economic and class grievances, distrust of elites, and veteran’s issues were crucial.
  • Quote: “Race was clearly a major factor in Trump's rise, but there were so many other things that were going on … [like] this hatred of the corporate press, the two political parties.” – Matt Taibbi [25:45]

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5. Are Taibbi and Greenwald Right-Wing Now?

[27:42–34:04]

• Both Taibbi and Greenwald have faced accusations of becoming “right-wing” simply for holding to traditional liberal principles like free speech and skepticism about Russiagate.
• Taibbi: His political stances haven’t changed; the landscape shifted around him. The “right-wing” label is often a lazy ad hominem.
  • Notable Moment:
    Coleman [30:26]: “Oh, but that’s a right-wing talking point.”
    Taibbi [30:34]: “Well, exactly right. And impossible… Reality is much more complicated.”
• Coleman argues that holding to principle will align you with different parties at different times; party is not principle.

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6. Free Speech, Censorship, and Book Bans

[34:04–40:58]

• Rising support for government/Big Tech censorship among Democrats; decline among Republicans.
• Republicans’ efforts to ban books (including Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist) are unwise and counterproductive; local bans have less impact than Big Tech censorship.
  • Quote: “The reason I don’t spend as much time talking about those local banning issues is because I just don’t think they’re as dangerous as the Facebook, Twitter, YouTube banning…” – Matt Taibbi [39:31]
• Coleman and Taibbi agree: Removing books merely lends them attention and doesn’t address the Internet’s supremacy as a cultural source.

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7. The COVID Lab Leak Hypothesis and Censorship

[40:58–56:40]

• The hypothesis that COVID-19 leaked from a lab was heavily censored online before becoming an accepted possibility.
• Both point out the string of facts supporting the plausibility of lab leak, from Fauci and Collins’ direct support of gain-of-function research in Wuhan to known precedents of lab outbreaks.
• The case’s censorship is a prime example of why fact-checking should be independent and not dictated by conflicted authorities.
  • Quote: “This is the major argument for why you can’t have censorship. Because somebody has to be doing the deciding about what people will and will not see. And sometimes those people are wrong, and other times those people are conflicted and wrong…” – Matt Taibbi [44:58]
• Taibbi reveals that YouTube bases misinformation guidance on government agency consultation, compounding the risk of bias and error.

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8. Profiteering During COVID—Taibbi’s Next Book

[56:40–60:18]

• Taibbi is working on a book about the COVID-19 pandemic as a driver of wealth consolidation and a massive transfer of money to billionaires and big corporations.
• He details how bailouts and government policy favor asset-holders and financiers, not ordinary people.
  • Quote: “The reality is basically that in a bailout economy where the Fed is spending four or five trillion dollars… If you own financial assets, you’re going to get richer. If you don’t, you’re going to lose.” – Matt Taibbi [59:05]
• The book will explain, sector by sector, how industries profited from COVID relief while widening inequality.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On media transparency:
  “They like to be treated like grownups.” – Matt Taibbi [11:55]

• On public health information:
  “If you lie to them even once the game is over ... they are never going to listen to you again.” – Matt Taibbi [16:32]

• On elite/political reporting:
  “Most of these people had never met somebody who supported Donald Trump.” – Matt Taibbi [21:55]

• On political labeling:
  “My politics really haven’t changed since I was a teenager ... what’s happened is I’ve just kind of stuck to what I do believe and that just happens to be unpopular now.” – Matt Taibbi [29:05]

• On censorship and trust:
  “This is the major argument for why you can’t have censorship. Because somebody has to be doing the deciding about what people will and will not see. And sometimes those people are wrong, and other times those people are conflicted and wrong…” – Matt Taibbi [44:58]

• On pandemic profiteering:
  “The reality is basically that in a bailout economy where the Fed is spending four or five trillion dollars… If you own financial assets, you’re going to get richer. If you don’t, you’re going to lose.” – Matt Taibbi [59:05]

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Timestamps for Major Topics

• 03:44–09:24 – Taibbi’s background, journalism roots, and worldview shaped by foreign experience
• 09:24–14:22 – The rise of Substack and decline of traditional media
• 14:22–20:50 – Public health messaging: paternalism vs. honesty
• 20:50–27:42 – Elites, cloistered reporting, and why Trump’s win surprised the media
• 27:42–34:04 – “Moving right”: why principle isn’t partisanship, shifting left/right labels
• 34:04–40:58 – Censorship in Big Tech vs. local book bans
• 40:58–56:40 – COVID lab leak theory: censorship and flawed gatekeeping
• 56:40–60:18 – COVID, inequality, and Taibbi’s forthcoming book on pandemic profiteering

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Summary

This episode of Conversations With Coleman offers an unfiltered, deeply analytical look at media trust, the dynamics of political labeling, and the urgent debates around openness versus censorship—whether in public health, journalism, or politics. Hughes and Taibbi, both self-described as principled iconoclasts, push back on simplistic labels and advocate for transparency, rigorous reporting, and the refusal to cede control of information to conflicted authorities. Their conversation is essential for anyone grappling with the realities of misinformation, cancel culture, and polarization in the modern media landscape.

Transcript

[A]

SA welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. If you're hearing this, then you're on the public feed, which means you'll get episodes a week after they come out and you'll hear advertisements. You can get access to the subscriber feed by going to ColemanHughes.org and becoming a supporter. This means you'll have access to episodes a week early, you'll never hear ads, and you'll get access to bonus Q and A episodes. You can also support me by liking and subscribing on YouTube and sharing the show with friends and family. As always, thank you so much for your support. Before we dive into today's episode, I have a few exciting updates to share. As some of you may know, I was recently a guest on Joe Rogan's podcast. We spoke for over three hours about a whole range of topics, so I really recommend you check that out on Spotify and let me know what you think. And in other news, members of the podcast got to hear my latest single called Straight A's last week, and if you didn't get a chance to listen to it, it's now available on all music streaming platforms for the public. So check that out. It's called Stray Days and the music video for that will be coming out in early March and that'll be available first to members and then to the world. As always, if you want to get early access to my podcasts and my music, you can sign [e-mail] now onto the episode. Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. My guest today is Matt Taibbi. Matt is a writer, journalist, and podcaster. He's a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and co host of the Useful Idiots podcast. He won the National Magazine Award in 2008 and is the author of many books, including the Great Derangement, Griftopia, and Hate, Inc. In this episode, Matt and I talk about the substack revolution. We talk about paternalism in public health messaging. We talk about why Trump won in 2016. We talk about the perception that people like Matt and myself are right wing. We talk about censorship from Big Tech. We talk about book bans in public schools. We discuss whether COVID 19 leaked from a labor and much more. So, without further ado, Matt Taibbi. All right, Matt Taibbi, thanks so much for coming on my show.

[B]

Thank you so much for having me on. It's an honor.

[A]

Yeah, I've been wanting to have you on for a long time. I've been reading your substack with Great pleasure. And I think a lot of my audience have as well. And there's a lot of topics of mutual interest, I think, but. But one topic of personal interest to me is your very strange and interesting life trajectory. That includes, correct me if I'm wrong, being a basketball player in Mongolia. And so, I mean, sounds extremely strange and interesting. And I want to know how you got from where you were born to there to here. In a nutshell, sure.

[B]

So I was born in New Jersey. My parents were both Rutgers students that were very young.

[A]

What town in New Jersey?

[B]

New Brunswick.

[A]

New Brunswick. Okay.

[B]

Yeah. And my father was a reporter. He worked at the Home News when he was a student, and then he was a TV reporter from a very young age, around 22 or so. So we moved to New England. He worked at a local affiliate there. And I never wanted to be a journalist. Growing up, I fell in love with novelists, especially funny novelists, and that's really what I wanted to do with my life. And went through school, had a bit.

[A]

Of a tough childhood for a variety, which funny novelists. There were some people on Twitter that were interested in who specifically you were into.

[B]

So my favorite writer growing up is someone who's kind of obscure in the United States, but he's a Russian writer named Nikolai Gogol. He wrote a book called Dead Souls, which is one of the great epic comedies of all time. Interestingly enough, it's about financial corruption. So I ended up writing about some of that stuff myself, but not as fiction. I love any satirical novels. So. Like Evil and Wa. You know, Gulliver's Travels, Catch 22, books like that. There were a lot of Russian writers that I was really interested in, which is why I ended up studying in Russia. When I was a college student, I went over and wanted to learn the language so that I could read these books in Russian. And then when I graduated, you know, I had a sort of a carpe diem attitude as a. As a young person. I thought Solzhenitsyn once said, there's nothing more boring than a man with a career. So I. I wasn't really interested in, as a young person, in building up through the ranks or having a journalism career, doing any of that. I saw it as a means to an end, to do interesting things with my life. I started being a bit of a foreign correspondent, but that was just to pay the bills overseas. And I spent, really, about 12 years traveling in the former Soviet Union, places like Mongolia, Uzbekistan. I. I just had a lot of weird experiences. My attitude was that I Would learn a lot about life. I'd learn a foreign language, and I wouldn't regret wasting my 20s in a cubicle. So I did stuff. I played for pro baseball in Moscow. I played basketball in Mongolia. I worked in a monastery, laid bricks in Siberia. I did all kinds of stuff like that. That was sort of the. Ended up being, like, the foundation for a journalism career, because I used journalism as a way to have a lot of those experiences. I would tell people that I was doing an article, and I would. I would write the article eventually. But really, it was just to have an interesting time.

[A]

So how did your adventures in Russia, Mongolia, and elsewhere inform your personality or your perspectives as a writer and journalist today?

[B]

Well, I think one of the things when you spend a lot of time outside the United States, you realize how insular reporters are in America. They have very little sense of how the rest of the world works. You see things in a more jaded way, maybe when you return home. In Russia, the corruption was so transparent, you could just so easily see which gangster was supporting which politician. And each one owned his own newspaper. So you would wake up in the morning and say, well, this mob interest wants me to think this, and this mob interest wants me to think that. And then when you come home to the United States, you realize it's not so different. It's just a little bit more. It looks a little more superficially respectable. So I think I just learned a lot about how the world going to different parts of the world and seeing how politics operates in different places and not thinking America was so very special or different than other places. It's just the scale here is much bigger than it is anywhere else.

[A]

So it made you more cynical about the American media and political landscape rather than less?

[B]

I think so. I mean, I wouldn't. I think cynical is an odd word because it implies a lack of idealism, which I don't think is actually the case. I'm actually quite idealistic and optimistic generally. But I did have a way. And when I came home, I did see the United States in a different light than I think a lot of my colleagues did. Especially when I started covering presidential elections and things like that. Most of the people who were on the bus, they were so enthralled and impressed with the process of getting somebody elected. And to me, it was much more mundane. It was always, well, this person's getting money from these banks and these oil companies, and that's their candidate, and this person isn't. And that's why this person isn't going to win. And I think that's how you have to look at politics. Not be so impressed by the superficialities of things, but just look at how things actually work.

[A]

So you're one of many writers that I enjoy that have moved to Substack. And Substack has created this platform where they can really credibly say, we don't censor people, we don't bend to pressure, we are politically neutral. And they've stepped into that brand and done it in a really credible way where Substack as a platform almost seems invisible and just like a neutral medium through which to deliver to your inbox writers that you like and to allow you to have a direct relationship to your patrons, pretty much. And I think it's done a really excellent thing. And there's so many other people that I love on that platform. At the same time, it's come under a lot of criticism for not being. For having no filter on its content, for being the midwife to lots of misinformation about COVID and other things. And then, you know, it's come under a different line of critique, which is that for people who like the Substack ecosystem, while this is great, but are we really influencing the mainstream conversation by sort of running and hiding in this cloistered substack world? So I guess my question is, A, why do you think Substack has seen such a boom? What is failing in media that's creating that demand? And B, what are the sort of promises and limits of the substack explosion?

[B]

That's a really good question. I think the reason it's succeeding, I think we both have a good idea of why that is. The traditional corporate media got to be basically unwatchable in recent years. It's just totally predictable. If you turn on MSNBC or Fox, it doesn't really matter either one of those channels, if you turn them on, you know, 100% of the time in advance, what they're going to say about every topic. And for me personally, I didn't exactly have that experience because I worked at Rolling Stone, which was where I had a good relationship with editors, and they gave me significant freedom to explore basically anything I wanted to. But still, if you were in that kind of center left ecosystem, there were increasingly certain pieties that you could not cross. You had to have certain mandatory opinions about things. And I think that turns off readers. They don't like that. They like to be treated like grownups. They like to be given the information and left to their own devices to decide what to do with it. I think increasingly in corporate media, what the attitude is is we are going to tell you not only what the information is, but we're going to filter out the stuff that we think isn't good for you, and we're going to tell you what to think. And people really don't like that. They don't respond well to that sort of hubristic approach to rhetoric. It's one of the reasons why a show like Joe Rogan's does well. I think it's just because it's not so much his delivery, it's this attitude of humility toward the audience that, well, I'll talk to this person, I'll talk to that person. We'll just all sort it out together. It's more relaxing for people. So I think that's part of what the success is. And as somebody who has worked in media for almost 30 years now and watched it progressively decline financially throughout that entire time, to be in substack where the opposite is happening is such a shock. I've never seen this before in media. So it's. The audiences are really big. The limitations, though, are pretty obvious. I think the problem with substack is that it depends upon generating a lot of content and it doesn't give you a lot of time to do like what I used to do, for instance, they would Rolling Stone, they would assign me to cover some financial topic and I would have eight weeks to do the investigation and then write it up and do all the fact checking and do all that stuff. You can't do that on substack. We just haven't figured out a way to monetize hardcore investigative reporting yet. I think that's kind of a limitation. But people are getting a wide array of opinions at least, and some journalism, and that is outside the mainstream and they like it. And I think that's a good thing.

[A]

Yeah. So speaking of this problem of treating people like children, this is also something I've noticed in the public health messaging during COVID And there is this, I think, real philosophical difference about what public health messaging should do. Should it be totally honest and transparent? Should it treat the population as more or less smart, capable of handling facts and nuance, capable of not jumping to false conclusions from true facts? Or should public health messaging be paternalistic? Should it be that Fauci. Francis Collins. Well, now no longer Francis Collins, but the public health officials should act sort of like our parents and they should manage and massage the truth in ways that are going to lead to the best outcomes. And fauci has openly admitted to massaging the truth about what number of people we need to get vaccinated to reach herd immunity. And he's basically said, I've been moving the numbers based on where I think the population is at, not based on what the scientific truth is. So, I mean, but let's treat this philosophical difference as a real difference, right? What is your philosophy of public health messaging and why do you think it's. Where do you weigh in on that debate? Why do you think your take is correct?

[B]

Well, I don't know about public health messaging specifically. I just think in terms of reaching audiences. My experience is always that if you treat audiences as grown ups that they respond better. Also, people in media and in politics, they tend to underestimate the general public to an enormous degree. Just to take an example from my own experience, I was asked to cover the 2008 financial crisis. After the election that year, I was repeatedly told by people in financial media, well, you can't get into the weeds on this stuff. You can't tell people what spend 2,000 words or 3,000 words on what a credit default swap is and how that works because people are stupid and they'll tune it out and they won't want to read forward on that. And it just turns out to be exactly the opposite. People actually have a tremendous hunger to have things explained to them and they want to be able to make informed decisions about what's going on. And if you lie to them even once the game is over from that point, like they are never going to listen to you again. And so I think what we've seen with COVID and you brought up a couple of the examples, but there have been so many of these instances where they, the superficial explanation is that they're for our own good. They're trying to either exclude facts or downplay facts in an effort to try to get people to make the decision to get vaccinated. Just to take an example, downplaying the effectiveness of natural immunity, why would you do that? Why would you tell people that, well, actually it doesn't really work or we recommend. Our assessment is that vaccination is more effective. Why can't you just say to people, look, natural immunity does work, but we also think that you should get vaccinated. That's a smart thing to do. And furthermore, as a society wide strategy, it works better for everybody if you get vaccinated. But if you happen to have already had a disease, you will be protected from it to a certain degree. And let's tell you exactly what that is. I don't understand why they can't do that. And they've taken the attitude from the beginning, I don't know what you think about this, that people can't handle those kinds of distinctions. And I think it's been catastrophic. I don't know about you, but to my mind, there's probably going to be always a certain number of people who will turn it, tune out the government, but they've increased that number, I think, by their posture.

[A]

Yeah. So I think my guess is that the intelligence of the population is sort of the wrong metric to be looking at here. But the conformism of the population is the right metric. Whether you're a conformist or not is sort of an element of your personality. I don't know if it's part genetic, part environmental or whatever, but you have people that are just more likely to do what the crowd is doing and to trust the common wisdom, and you have people that are less likely to do that. And I think more conformist people end up at more conformist institutions. And I think they assume that more people are like them in the world than actually are.

[B]

That's a good point.

[A]

I think they think if we just say that natural immunity doesn't work, if we basically call any concern about myocarditis misinformation, rather than give the nuanced take of natural immunity is good too. But we still recommend you get vaxxed or there is an increased risk of myocarditis for, you know, boys aged 18, men aged 18 to 24. But it's actually still, you know, very, very safe despite even the, even the worst estimates suggest you should probably still get the vaccine in most cases. And that doesn't generalize to people outside of that population. Right. So people think that people underestimate the number of nonconformists and I think they therefore underestimate the deleterious effect to their own reputation by telling these sort of quote unquote white lies. I think they assume most people are just gonna look at the headline, nod along and do this, and a lot of people do, but a lot of people don't. And I think they're just sort of not around those people. And so they underestimate the effect on their own reputation.

[B]

Yeah, I think you're right. I never really thought of it that way, but yeah, that's probably what's going on is that the people who are doing this messaging assume that people, everybody out there thinks the way they do and they're wrong about that. But you would have to have some kind of experience talking to people generally in order to know that. And that's another one of the problems with the kind of elite messaging system in this country, which is that there isn't a whole lot of interplay between people in Washington and New York, elite decision makers in all fields in politics, finance, whatever, and the rest of the country. I've seen this over and over again in presidential politics. How does something like Trump happen? How does every single mainstream news outlet not only miscall the general election, but miscall the Republican primary? I mean, you had data journalists like fivethirtyeight. Com saying things like, donald Trump will play in the NBA before he's the nominee of the Republican Party at a time when he was wiping everybody out in the polls. And the reason for that is because most of these people had never met somebody who supported Donald Trump. So if you actually went out on the trail and you talked to people or you went to some of those crowds, and I remember being shocked by it. I thought. I thought Trump, there was no way this guy could possibly win. He's ridiculous and kind of horrible. And then I went to these events and I saw, well, he's connecting with all sorts of people, and he was doing all sorts of subtle things that I was not told about in the news media. And they were working as well. And so when you start talking to people, you start realizing there's this diverse range of reasons that people were coming to vote for this person. But you would have to have those conversations in order to know that. And that's not what's going on. They're relying too much on things like polls to make decisions as opposed to personal contact. The same thing happened again after the 2008 crash. I remember talking to somebody in the treasury who had just had a meeting before. I think it was before Christmas in the first year of Obama's presidency. It was a presentation by some of the nation's biggest retailers to officials at the treasury, and they were giving their estimates of how little people were going to spend for the holiday season. And that was how people in the treasury learned that there was a lot of pain out there in the population that people were not doing well after the 2008 crash from a presentation by big corporate retailers. They didn't know anybody who wasn't doing well. And that's a real problem with information in this country, is the lack of interplay between those groups.

[A]

Yeah, and there's also. I mean, I would admit to being as clueless and cloistered quote, elite bubble kind of person. When Trump got elected, as anyone in that, I was as surprised as the people at FiveThirtyEight in the New York Times. And I knew as few people that would have voted for Trump. But it seemed to me a lot of people like me. The reaction was, wow, my mom. It was like my model of the country was totally flawed. Obviously, given that I totally mispredicted what happened and the way it was wrong is that there's actually way more racist than I thought. Somehow in the same country that just elected Obama twice, there's been like a random recent huge spike in racism. And that's the most important explanation for this. Whereas my response was like, clearly my model of the country is wrong. My model of what's going on is missing some crucial variables. But it can't be that the same country that just elected Barack Hussein Obama twice suddenly had a massive upswing in racism. That explains this. It has to be certain other factors. And I think there was a huge, a lot of people weren't willing to do that.

[B]

Yeah. And especially since the data didn't really bear that out. Like Trump did very well in a lot of the parts of the country, the same parts of the country that Obama did like. Obama was one of the first Democrats who retook the so called Reagan Democrats in places like suburban Detroit, where the union workers, auto workers had long ago defected to the Republican Party. Obama did really well in a lot of those places that had been lost to Democrats for a long time. And Trump did well with those same voters. I talked to a lot of those people. Look, race was clearly a major factor in Trump's rise, but there were so many other things that were going on and a lot of it had to do with just this class issue, this hatred of the, the corporate press, the two political parties. And Trump represented this figure who came out and said, look, they have been lying to you. There's not a whole lot of difference between Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton. They're supported by the same people. You think Jeb Bush is going to give you cheaper pharmaceutical prices? Look, his campaign finance chair is Woody Johnson, who is the head of Johnson and Johnson. I mean, you know, this guy's not going to do it for you. And that message really worked. He also really clicked with veterans who had come back from the Middle East. I started to see a lot of, a lot of vets at his appearances over the course of that campaign because he would, he was talking about NATO. He wasn't exactly, you know, anti war because he said things like I'm great at war. And he suggested that he was going to be a terrific at that. But he talked about the uselessness of a lot of our foreign conflicts and he was scoring points with that stuff, especially when he said things like both parties supported it. So there were a lot of factors, but I think there was a concerted effort on the part of people in the mainstream press to say this can't be happening. It has to be some simple explanation and we can just put it, you know, put a bow on it and put it over there and never think about it again. Whereas the implications of Trump's win were actually a lot more disturbing than they, you know, to those people, than they wanted to admit. And they, they still haven't done it, I don't think.

[A]

So. There's this perception that people like you and Glenn Greenwald have moved to the right. And that's, you know, partly the result of you being, I think you and Glenn actually being sort of calling the Russia Trump is a Russia, Russian asset story out as BS from the beginning and certain other topics that would lead right wing audience to like you probably, if not for the first time, then certainly more than they would have five, 10 years ago. Have you moved to the right? And if so, people blame this on the so called audience capture phenomenon. Can you speak to that? Because that's an impression that's out there about you.

[B]

Yeah, I know, and it's troubling and I see that on Twitter all the time. My answer to that is no. My views really on everything have remained exactly the same. I think I've always been very much against censorship, very much a free speech advocate. I'm basically kind of an old school ACLU liberal. I mean, that's. My politics really haven't changed since I was a teenager. And that's really on all issues. I think what's happened is that the consensus on a lot of those issues has shifted dramatically. So we now have this sort of center left belief that de platforming works, that we have to do something on misinformation. So there's this deep, profound mistrust of the principles of free speech. You see the shift at the aclu, right, where the Ira Glasser types who would have defended the Nazis in the 70s, they now think very dramatically differently about that. They probably wouldn't make that decision now. So, you know, I haven't changed at all. I think what's happened is I've just kind of stuck to what I do believe and that just happens to be Unpopular. Now, there's also a propaganda technique that I find really tiresome. I don't know if you've encountered this yourself. I think you have. I've seen this on Twitter where, you know, anytime anybody wants to criticize some figure who has an opinion that's a little bit different, you know, the go to response is, oh, well, that's right wing. Right? And it's not, you know, it's not. It's much more. Reality is much more complicated.

[A]

Oh, but that's a right wing talking point. It's like, okay, but could you concede that a right wing talking point could be true?

[B]

Well, exactly right. Exactly right. And impossible. Yeah. And to take the example of that Russia story that you brought up, again, I had spent a long time in Russia. I was there for almost 12 years of my life, and I had a lot of contacts who were still in the Russian press. I didn't really pay a whole lot of attention to that story early on. I thought it was silly. So it didn't really make a big impression on me. But one when I finally did start to write about it, it wasn't from the posture of, oh, I'm a conservative now, I support Donald Trump. For me, it was, is this story true or not? And it didn't seem to be true. And I was kind of shocked by the reaction that, oh, well, if you are saying that the story is not true, that must mean that you support Trump, which to me was just completely inconsistent logically. It also showed me a lot about where the press's head was at, at that time, because that one time, again, I grew up in a family of reporters. The dominant thinking about how to do the job was, we didn't really care all that much. We just wanted to get it right. The job is hard enough if you're trying to just be accurate. Whether or not information helps or hurts a certain political party, that's really more the, the audience's problem. It's not really our problem. Our job is just to tell you what we see and which way. That that information cuts is not really a matter for the press to worry about, but now they very much think it is. And that's a new thing. I think that's part of what's going on.

[A]

There's a great quote by Thomas Sowell, who's one of my favorite writers, who said, on the topic of racial equality, if you believed in equal treatment for blacks and whites, you'd be paraphrasing, but you'd be a radical in 1950, you know, a liberal in 1970 and a conservative today. Right, right. Whereas, like you can, you know, the notion that race should have no place in how New York State Department of Health prioritizes who should get antivirals for Covid. Right. Like that. That's my position. And it's squarely in the civil rights tradition of race is not a proxy for anything crucial. We have better proxies for your need for Covid antivirals. And it's discriminatory, full stop in principle to inject it, that belief. If that puts me on the quote, unquote, right, then on that particular issue, I don't care, because I have to. You have to be a person of principle. Right. Like a party is not a principle. So insofar as you have principles, and I talked to Glenn Greenwald about this, you're very likely over your lifetime to find yourself in any given moment aligned with one or the other party on a particular issue because neither of the parties are consistent and principled. Right. So by definition, if you are consistent in principles, you're going to be. You're going to be on either side on any given issue. So, I mean, that's definitely the way I see it. Unfortunately, a lot of people don't see it that way, but that's what it is.

[B]

They're incredibly narrow minded about that. And I think that example you brought up is a really powerful and interesting one. I mean, not that long ago, in 2017, that was just five years ago, I published a book about Eric Garner's killing, I Can't Breathe. And in the course of that research for that book, I met lawyers who had risked their lives to fight cases for the ACLU back in the early 70s in an effort to get race out of the law. Right. Like they had been involved with cases that were. There were essentially like school segregation desegregation cases in Arkansas. And every day had dealt with death threats, had had things thrown at them, one of them had, you know, had had a brick thrown at him. And to. I remember being inspired by these stories, thinking that this was heroic. Like, that's what, that's what a person of conscience does. And now all of a sudden, not long ago, I was covering a story in Loudoun County, Virginia, where there's an effort now basically to reintroduce the idea of let's overtly put race into the school's method for choosing admissions to gifted programs on the basis of this new equity ideas. Again, what they would have thought in 1972 or 1973 would have been sort of radically left or radically liberal or however you would have thought, maybe not radically at that time already, but it would have been certainly squarely on that side. Now all of a sudden it's considered the opposite. And yeah, I don't think that that's right wing to stick to that principle of believing in, for instance, race neutral law. But, you know, we'll see how that pans out.

[A]

So I saw, I saw Glenn Greenwald actually post a link to a Pew poll from last year which asked people whether they supported more censorship from the government of misinformation and more censorship from Big Tech. And it looked at the time trend like how this question has changed since 2018. Right. And it's just Republicans supporting censorship less from Big Tech, Democrats supporting it more. And it's something like a 70% rate of support from Democrats and a 30% rate of support for censorship from Republicans. So at this moment, that has become more and more of a partisan issue. We are at the same time, the right is very focused on banning books from public libraries in schools and getting certain books out of the curriculum at schools. So I want to talk a little bit about that too. And just like the disclaimer here, I know from talking about this on Twitter that someone's immediate response is going to be, if you're against banning books, you're okay with my 5 year old seeing books with, you know, guys giving each other blowjobs in their school library. No, that is not what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about like sexually explicit imagery that a child is not at all ready for. I'm against that in a very common sense way. I'm talking about, you know, the, you know, people on the right trying to get a book like Ibram Kendi's how to be Anti Racist out of Their Public School library. Or I know of at least one case that seems to come from people on the left in Burbank, California trying to get to Kill a Mockingbird and like Huck Finn of Mice and Men banned partly because of some sort of strange trendy woke ideas about the white savior being bad. And like racism isn't just in the past, but it does seem the majority of this stuff is coming from the right at this moment. So what do you have to say about getting books banned from libraries, banned from curriculums and that kind of soft censorship?

[B]

Well, I'm against it. I think it's very short sighted. The Republicans, it's interesting because they've spent the last two or three years railing against Internet censorship and They've scored a lot of points doing that. And then they turn right around at the state level and they do essentially the same thing by trying to ban books. You mentioned the Ibram Kennedy book. Just removing that book from the library is just stupid. Not only is there a Streisand effect there where you're going to call attention to it and people are going to read it more, but as I think you pointed out, there's the Internet. People are going to find it anyway. And that's a different question from deciding what's in the curriculum. You have to decide what's in the curriculum. That's what school boards exist to do. And sometimes they make decisions that are unpopular. And I feel a little bit differently about that than I do about removing something entirely from a school system or a library. That's a slightly different question. The reason I don't spend as much time talking about those local banning issues is because I just don't think they're as dangerous as the Facebook, Twitter, YouTube banning situations, because those are on a scale that is so much more massive. And just politically, it's just much more dangerous. If the Republicans had the ability to lean on Facebook and Google and Twitter in the same way that the Democratic Party establishment is able to, right now, I'd be rallying against it in the same way. I just think that new frontier of censorship is something that we should be really, really frightened by. We've been there before with local book bannings. Communities tend to rise up against those. They don't really go that far, and they tend to be localized problems. This other thing is new and serious, I think.

[A]

I think it's also ironically, part of my argument for why taking a book out of the school library doesn't work is precisely this point you're making that there's a huge influence difference between what goes on on the Internet and what books are in your school, your kid's school library, right. They're going to encounter it on the Internet because that's the main source of culture and information. So, you know, what I'm saying is getting it out of the library is ineffective, but it does hand a very good optics and PR victory to a person like Kendi, who can then say on the Internet where your kid is likely to see it, they're banning this book from your school. You know, doesn't that make you more interested in reading it kind of a thing? I mean, so I want to talk about one. One of, I think the. The most egregious examples of censorship of an idea from the past two years, which is the hypoth hypothesis that COVID 19 leaked from the lab in Wuhan. So this is something I've been, you know, I don't think I've ever actually talked publicly about what I think about that until right now. But the more and more I read about it, the more clear it becomes that I think it's the likely alternative. It's more likely than not that it did leak from a lab. And obviously this was, you know, if you tweeted this at one point, it would get removed, or if you put this on Facebook, at minimum, it would get flagged as misinformation and removed. And now it's viewed as a credible hypothesis and it's no longer flagged as misinformation. But I'm curious, what is your take on this? Like, if you had to put money on it, do you believe the wet market theory or the lab leak theory?

[B]

Well, it's difficult because I feel like I lack a little bit of the technical understanding to really sift through some of the arguments which are about the genetics of the virus. How credible are the people who are saying that X piece of evidence indicates that it can have occurred in the wild? That's something I'd have to do a little bit of work on before I had an opinion. What I will say is that from a reporting standpoint, it was deeply suspicious early that everybody was so sure that it couldn't have been come from a lab. Because, you know, as you know, in journalism, we know nothing. Right. None of us are experts in any of this stuff. And when we get these stories, at best, you know, we're trying to hit a moving target early. This is our best guess about what's happening. But we can't rule out these five things. These are some of the possibilities. And right from the start, and we did a mashup of this on my site just this week, there was this overwhelming emphasis on telling everybody that it was a conspiracy theory, it was impossible. Then there was Facebook made the announcement that it was going to take down people who suggested that the, the virus did not have a natural origin. And now we're seeing these emails back and forth between the Eco alliance and people like Fauci and some of these other scientists. Now, those I do understand, even if I don't necessarily grasp the technical aspects of it. Clearly what's going on in those emails is a real fear of a PR problem, which isn't by itself proof of anything. But it certainly lends credibility to the notion that they thought it was possible early on. So we can't say that these officials thought it was impossible at that time because they were clearly considering it. So that makes it at least one of the frontrunners to be true at this point. And this, to me is the major argument for why you can't have censorship. Because somebody has to be doing the deciding about what people will and will not see. And sometimes those people are wrong, and other times those people are conflicted and wrong, which is what is going on in this case potentially. And the only defense against that is to let people hypothesize and theorize and investigate and do all those things. So I think this is a tremendously sort of important story, both in terms of the history of the pandemic, but also in terms of our attitude towards speech. If they were to shut this down completely and make it impossible for us to talk about this, you know, that would put us in a completely new political realm that we haven't been in since World War II or World War I. We've never had that kind of speech control over this important issue before. So, yeah, I think this is a really worrisome one.

[A]

So I want to give my audience some of my thinking behind why I think it's more likely that it came from a laboratory. And just like you, I have no expertise in virology. So this, you know, there is a separate question of whether what the virus looks like could only have been man made. And I have genuinely no opinion on that. I can't have an opinion on, you know, I know nothing about like furin cleavage sites and whatever that kind of thing is. But there are a lot of facts that are no longer disputed that are not. These are not substack facts. These are Washington Post facts that make it, I think, much more plausible than the alternative. So one is that Fauci and Collins were at the helm of supporting and funding gain of function research, which basically we're going to get scientists to make viruses more transmissible and more deadly in the lab so that we can prepare ourselves for future pandemics that might feature such viruses. Right.

[B]

It's just so amazing that they do that. But anyway, go ahead.

[A]

And this is completely new. This was a new idea. We weren't doing this in the 90s and the 2000s. It was really Collins and Fauci directly that, you know, I don't know whose idea it was exactly, but they were at the helm of making this a reality. And In, I think 2011, I'm probably going to post the Washington Post article in the description here so people can read this for themselves. But in 2011, they have two labs now. They funded two labs through the NIH and the NIAID, one in Wisconsin and one in the Netherlands, where scientists are hard at work making the flu more deadly. Right. And this was controversial. They published a paper about it and some people in the White House and the scientific community were worried about the safety protocols. Long story short, Fauci and they set up an oversight committee to put a veto check on whether Francis Collins and Fauci can fund new projects by 2015 or so. They've managed to basically defang the veto committee fully so that now they have, they once again have full autonomy to fund new gain of function projects. And you know, they write in the Washington Post earlier that about why they support gain of function research, why it's crucial. And you know, by 2015, they've, they've partnered with Eco, Eco Health alliance to, to fund the Wuhan Lab, which is working on gain of function research with coronaviruses starting in something like 2015. I mean, like everything I'm saying right here is, is not, is not disputed. And, and so imagine, you know, if it had, if it did come from the Wuhan Lab, there would just be such a direct link between the advocacy and funding of Fauci and Collins. And that result, I mean, so obviously previous SARS outbreaks have occurred naturally, so that's very much possible. But roll the clock back to 2011 and imagine if a highly. An unusually transmissible version of the flu, an unusually deadly version of the flu sprang out of Madison, Wisconsin. Right. There would be no debate. It would instantly be the common sense and the scientific consensus that it came from the lab. Quite likely, given that there are only two places in the world making the flus more deadly. So, I mean, it would be an enormous coincidence, I think, if this came out of the wet market. And I'm certainly aware of one Oxford study which said that there were actually no bats or pangolins sold at the Wuhan Wet market from 2017 to 2019. So there are certainly no affirmative reasons to believe the wet market theory. There's been no evidence provided for that thesis. And so, I mean, that's a little bit of color on why I think it's more likely.

[B]

And those are all perfectly logical reasons. And there are also reasons why you can't use the words like debunked when you talk about the lab leak until you have an affirmative proof that it came from a wet market or, you know, exactly who the original host was or how that transmission took place. You can't rule out anything. And they did. And that was suspicious. And all those other things you're talking about are exactly right. I mean, and they've lied about it repeatedly, which makes it worse. I'm going to sound a little bit like a hypocrite on this because the Trump people also lied about the Russia story, but that wasn't necessarily proof that it was true. But this is a little different. I think what you're saying in combination with the sudden sort of official reversals on the admissibility of this topic as, you know, possibility that all suggests that they take it seriously, that they think that there's no way to deny it anymore. So, yeah, I think if it's not the leading candidate, it's certainly very, very, you know, very, very plausible.

[A]

Yeah. So I'm just remembering some other facts that also militate in this direction. One is, at least according to this Washington Post article, I think it's called A Science in the Darkness, there have been three virus leaks on the Asian continent since the SARS outbreak in 2003. There's been one in Singapore, one in Beijing and one in Taiwan, I think. Right. So we know it's possible for labs in countries with highly developed science to leak viruses. Right. It's. Whatever's going on, we have not figured out anything close to a method of completely preventing this and preventing human error here. We know it's happened many times in my lifetime.

[B]

I'll think about Marburg.

[A]

Right.

[B]

I mean, that happened in, you know, in several sites in Europe. So.

[A]

Right. So it's a, it's just like it's totally possible. There's nothing, nothing in principle preventing it. And, and we now, I think, have actual email evidence of when, you know, when Fauci first called a meeting about this in late January 2020, sort of before most of us in America had really registered that the virus was a thing for us too. He called a meeting of virologists and many of them, two or three of them seemed to think it was at least a 50, 50 toss up based on their looking at the genome. And at least one or two of them said this genome is more consistent with being man made or man altered. And, you know, that was suppressed immediately because Fauci and Collins didn't want to be, presumably did not want to be the people who funded, over objection, over objections from many other people, the people who funded more or less directly, the lab that leaked a virus that changed the world. I mean, that would involve such a massive concession to their reputations. So, I mean, you put all that together, it's insane that this was flagged as misinformation for so long. And as you say, it's just another. A great example of why censorship is, why big tech companies are not, and quote, fact checkers even, are really not to be fully trusted, to be given power, to be given credence.

[B]

Yeah, and I did a story last year about, and it wasn't really that big of a story, but it was about the dispute between Bret Weinstein and YouTube. And I don't want to take a position on who was right or wrong in that whole thing, but what was interesting about it was when I talked to YouTube about their criteria for what constituted misinformation, they flat out told me that their guidelines were, were constructed in consultation with the fda, the CIA, CBC, and the nih. So this is where you have a problem. If you have big tech censorship, if you have a, you know, monopoly or an oligopoly of information over information, and they're in. Their guidelines are coming from government authorities that may be conflicted in these matters, that's a serious problem. I mean, if you imagine if the Pentagon had been the arbiter of what is true and what is not true after the Iraq war, how long would it have taken for us to find out that there were no WMDs in Iraq? It probably would have taken even longer than it did, although they were pretty successful just relying upon the natural incuriosity of reporters at that time. But still, that's the danger of this kind of censorship, is that somebody always has to do it. And those somebodies can be conflicted.

[A]

So you're writing a new book right now on profiteering during the COVID pandemic. Can you give us a little sense of what motivated you to write that book and what it's about?

[B]

Sure. And I think what's happened in the last couple of years, I've fallen victim to this. You know, a lot of this culture war stuff is it's really interesting and it's, it's fun to talk about it. It gets a lot of heat on the Internet and all that. But the big story of the last couple of years, really, to me when you think about it, has been the way in which this disaster has exacerbated the wealth divide in this country. And we've seen yet another massive transfer of wealth from ordinary people to billionaires. Again, this is something that I saw after 2008. The bailouts have a Tendency, because the way we do bailouts in this country is basically to pour money into the financial sector and hope it works its way down to the rest of the country. But it doesn't really work that way. What ends up happening is it gets gobbled up by people who know how to manipulate the financial system. And that's what we've seen in the last two years. From the moment that Trump signed the CARES act in March of 2020, the stock market went way up. Banks had their best year ever. They had record underwriting years, over $100 billion in profits both in 2020 and 2021. Private equity companies last year took over a trillion dollars in companies. Billionaires have seen their net worth go up $2 trillion just in the last two years. So it's gone from 3.1 trillion to 5.1 trillion in less than two years. The reality is basically that in a bailout economy where the Fed is spending four or five trillion dollars pouring into the financial system, if you own financial assets, you're going to get richer. If you don't, you're going to lose. And I think a lot of people don't understand how that mechanism works. My idea with this book is basically to go sector by sector and explain, well, how did private equity do so well in the last two years? How did banks do so well? How did defense companies do so well, which they did, by the way. They were given special dispensation. They were given advances on all their contracts, which they immediately poured into stock buybacks so that executives could turn it into compensation for themselves. So pharmaceutical companies obviously are making a fortune. And Pfizer did $82 billion in profits last year. This is the kind of work I really like to do, which is in the weeds, investigative reporting about how each of these sectors made money in the last two years while everybody else didn't, and how that works. Because I think the big cultural story since Trump happened is people have this vague sense that there's a rigged game. They're being ripped off, but they don't know exactly how. And so what I'm trying to do is sort of speak directly to that. Yes, it is kind of a rigged game, but maybe not in the way that some people are talking about.

[A]

Well, I'd love to have you back on when that's finished.

[B]

I would love to come back on.

[A]

Matt Taibi, thanks so much for your time.

[B]

Coleman, thanks so much. Appreciate it.

[A]

If you appreciate the work I do, the best ways to support me are to subscribe directly through my website. Colemanhughes.org and to subscribe to my YouTube channel so you'll never miss my new content. As always, thanks for your support.