← The Tucker Carlson Show
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
01:50:17
Loading summary
Transcript397 lines
- [00:01]
Tucker Carlson
So everyone's mad that even some Democrats, I think, are mad about these last minute Biden pardons of Fauci and the J6 committee, et cetera, et cetera. So let's just set that aside. My concern is not that these people are punished. Fauci's 81.
- [00:16]
Matt Taibbi
Yeah, who cares?
- [00:17]
Tucker Carlson
I think he'll be punished, you know, in some larger sense. But I want to know what they did. That's the. Okay, so can we just go through a couple of these and like, why would you pardon Foushee? What are the potential crimes, the crimes you think he committed and could be punished for that you're trying to prevent him from being punished for by pardoning him?
- [00:37]
Matt Taibbi
Well, with Foushee specifically, the. The one thing that comes to mind immediately is perjury.
- [00:44]
Tucker Carlson
Yes.
- [00:45]
Matt Taibbi
Because he's been accused of that essentially already by, you know, the House committee.
- [00:51]
Tucker Carlson
Lying under oath to the Congress, lying.
- [00:52]
Matt Taibbi
Under oath to the Congress in particular, saying, you know, that we have, we have never funded gain of resour research, that we weren't doing it during this time period, even as there are other people in the government, like the deputy director of the NIH saying, yes, we were, or Ralph Barak, who was one of the scientists at unc, saying, yes, absolutely, that was a gain of function. So there's a little bit of a problem there. Now, he later amended the statement and said that he was speaking in a specific way under a specific definition, but there's exposure there. But that's, that's not really the issue with Fauci.
- [01:34]
Tucker Carlson
The issue, I believe that. Welcome to the Tucker Carlson Show. We bring you stories that have not been showcased anywhere else and they're not censored, of course, because we're not gatekeepers. We are honest brokers here to tell you what we think you need to know and do it honestly. Check out all our content@tucker carlson.com here's the episode.
- [02:05]
Matt Taibbi
The issue is really, it's about the whole rat's nest of gain of function. How much did the authorities know about what was going on at the Wuhan Institute? Did they have human sources at the Wuhan Institute? Did the. Was there advance warning that this was coming? Were they suppressing investigations into the possibility of a lab leak because of the connections to US Research? All that stuff is in play. I mean, there's, there's a lot of stuff that's going on that, you know, that you want to know.
- [02:39]
Tucker Carlson
So Fauci was part of the US Bioweapons program, obviously, right? I mean, if you're Funding, gain of function. It's, you know, vaccines are one part of that, but probably not the only part of it. Right. So the idea is you make the virus more dangerous in order to create a vaccine to fight the virus.
- [02:55]
Matt Taibbi
Right, that's true.
- [02:56]
Tucker Carlson
But in the process you wind up with much more dangerous viruses.
- [02:59]
Matt Taibbi
Right. And that's one of the things that raised a red flag for some of the people who were looking at the COVID phenomenon is just look at the surface characteristics of the disease. It's highly transmissible.
- [03:13]
Tucker Carlson
Yes.
- [03:13]
Matt Taibbi
It doesn't, it's not terribly symptomatic. Everybody's going to get it, not everybody's going to be harmed by it. It's what they designed. What you would do if you were designing a disease to carry a vaccine, for instance.
- [03:28]
Tucker Carlson
Yes.
- [03:28]
Matt Taibbi
Yeah.
- [03:29]
Tucker Carlson
So my interest is not in Fauci. I think any normal person can make up his mind about Fauci. It's pretty obvious who Fauci is, the super bureaucrat. It's in the bioweapon programs and the Frankenstein science that's being funded by our tax dollars around the world, to be specific, in Ukraine, in China, in Djibouti. You know, we biolabs in a lot of places around the world and like, what are they doing?
- [03:59]
Matt Taibbi
What are they doing? What was their relation to, to the Wuhan Institute also? I mean, I think those are all important questions, like both the bioweapons and, you know, the, the relation to the, to the, the pandemic. But the, the thing is about these pardons, they're a mistake. If you want to know what's happening, they just made it a lot easier for us to find out. Because now once the pardon's delivered, the person can't plead the fifth. If they're brought before a grand jury, they can't take the fifth anymore. If they're brought before a congressional committee, they can't invoke the right against self incrimination. So they have to say something. And this is what's so interesting because I've been talking to criminal defense attorneys, people who are former Senate investigators, some current Senate investigators, and they all kind of said the same thing. It's so illogical to give somebody a pardon if you're trying to cover up things that the only reason you would really do it is if there's very serious crimes involved. Right. So that's a red flag for us. When we see somebody getting, getting a pardon, we think, well, why would they do that unless there's something really bad there? Right. So either it's a mistake where they just stupidly made it easier for everybody to investigate, or there's something we don't know about that is interesting.
- [05:25]
Tucker Carlson
Well, it's such a profound thing to do. I mean, I. If somebody said to you, matt, would you accept a pardon? You would say, well, why would I need to. Why would I need a pardon? No, I mean, that's like.
- [05:35]
Matt Taibbi
No, it's.
- [05:36]
Tucker Carlson
It's incriminating, it's morally incriminating, or has the appearance of moral incrimination just by its fact. Right.
- [05:43]
Matt Taibbi
It's not only morally incriminating, it's legally incriminating, as the Department of Justice itself said in a memo. I think on One of the J6 cases, it said, this does not unring the bell of conviction if you get a pardon going forward. So you're making an admission if you accept a pardon. So, yeah, I wouldn't accept one if I were totally innocent, of course. Yeah. And also, I wouldn't accept one if I had something to hide, because now if I'm dragged before a congressional committee or especially a grand jury investigation, now, I can't tap out and say, yeah, I'm sorry, I'm going to take the Fifth on that.
- [06:22]
Tucker Carlson
That's fascinating.
- [06:23]
Matt Taibbi
Right. So the whole thing is really illogical. I think it was more meant to be a symbolic gesture. And this is really, I think, speaks to the thinking of the Biden administration about so many things. Right. They were so driven by optics with Trump that they did. So. They did a lot of things that were incredibly stupid. So they want to portray him as vengeful and out to get people. And the, the pardons are a good way to do that, I mean, if you're aiming for that audience. But it had the negative effect of. Of opening all these investigations up, it seems to me.
- [07:02]
Tucker Carlson
So you really think this was aimed at MSNBC viewers just to paint Trump as a vindictive person?
- [07:09]
Matt Taibbi
So I asked a lot of people, why did they do this? Like, what's the point? And one of the theories was that. That this is messaging.
- [07:18]
Tucker Carlson
Yes.
- [07:18]
Matt Taibbi
That they were trying to create a headline and there were lots of headlines instantaneously. If you saw them, they all basically said the same thing, like, you know, to ward off future vindictive retaliatory acts by the Trump administration. You know, Biden issues pardons. It's always after the comma, Right? Yeah, that's one theory. The other theory is that in the last days of a presidential administration, it gets pretty chaotic in the White House, and people who want things and you Know they will come in and there will be a hurried frenzy to put stuff on paper. And that's why there are unprecedented things in these pardons. For instance, the J6 pardons, this has never happened before where you give a pardon to a category of unnamed people. Right. It says to the members of the committee, to the Capitol police officers who testified to the staff, but it doesn't delineate the names of the people who are pardoned. So now if you want to invoke your pardon, you actually have to go over a test to prove that you're actually part of that category that I testified before the committee. Does that mean that the committee called you that. That you talked to a staffer once? Or does that mean you actually sat in front of the hall and testified? It's very weird. And the only explanation that I could come up with from people is that they were in a hurry, they didn't have all the names.
- [08:49]
Tucker Carlson
It's amazing.
- [08:50]
Matt Taibbi
Right.
- [08:51]
Tucker Carlson
So, but how. Why would you preemptively pardon the J6 committee? I mean, that's like the single most legitimate, morally empowered, great group of people ever empaneled in this country. Like, truly.
- [09:07]
Matt Taibbi
Well, I mean, there are obviously some theories about why they would do that. Right.
- [09:14]
Tucker Carlson
Mother Teresa, she was such a great person. We're going to preemptively pardon her. Like what? This is, like, crazy.
- [09:20]
Matt Taibbi
No, it is absolutely crazy. And if I were some of those people, I'd be offended.
- [09:26]
Tucker Carlson
Yes.
- [09:26]
Matt Taibbi
Especially the people who testified and who didn't lie under oath, for instance. Right. Because they're all named. Yeah. All the police officers who testified to the committee. Now, what if they're only really trying to protect a couple of them and there are some very conspicuous names.
- [09:47]
Tucker Carlson
I think we know who they are.
- [09:48]
Matt Taibbi
Right? Yeah, exactly.
- [09:49]
Tucker Carlson
The ones they're trying to protect.
- [09:51]
Matt Taibbi
Right. But what if you're one of the other ones who just. Who just gave some testimony?
- [09:55]
Tucker Carlson
They. I mean, they interviewed hundreds and probably thousands of people. Right.
- [09:59]
Matt Taibbi
It's some number.
- [10:00]
Tucker Carlson
Like that massive number. And I assume most of them told the truth. I mean.
- [10:04]
Matt Taibbi
Right, right.
- [10:05]
Tucker Carlson
Most people do tell the truth, actually. I think.
- [10:07]
Matt Taibbi
I think that's probably the case. Yeah. I mean, especially if you're under oath and you're a law enforcement officer. I mean, it's a very serious thing to. To lie in those situations. And, you know, there are a couple of places in the testimony where it doesn't look good for some of the people who testified. But for the vast majority of them, I would take it as a grievous insult to be given that pardon and especially to not be named that. That's what's so weird about it.
- [10:33]
Tucker Carlson
But it suggests what I have thought from the first week, which is they're like serious crimes here. I mean, you talk to Steve Sund, you know, who ran Capitol Police, who's like a non political person, just career law enforcement, former MP, former Washington D.C. cop. I don't think he has any weird agenda. I mean, his story's so unbelievable. They just didn't give him any intel at all and didn't give him any resources. And everybody else knew this was happening except him. I mean, the whole thing is so nuts that you're like, wait, there's something going on here. I don't really know. The pipe bombs at the, the pipe.
- [11:07]
Matt Taibbi
Bombs, the gallows that was erected by some weird unknown group the night before.
- [11:12]
Tucker Carlson
Will we ever get disclosure? I guess that's what I want. I just want to know. I again, I'm not, I am not vengeful. I don't really want to punish people so much as I just want to know that feels like punishment enough. Will we.
- [11:23]
Matt Taibbi
I think we will. I think we're, we're heading into a golden age for investigative journalism. I think this is after eight years of crazy, misleading news stories and dead ends and unanswered questions and fake news, you know, ranging from Russiagate to Nordstream to, you know, the COVID origins where we were actively kept away from one side of that story for years. I think we're going to find out a lot of this stuff. There are investigations already underway, document hunts going on all over the place. There are reports that have been commissioned to look into a lot of these questions. And they're going to be staffed up with a lot of money and a lot of personnel. And it's just an unprecedented situation where, for instance, the DHS or the FBI or the DOJ would be in sync with congressional investigators to the point where they're not going to have to issue subpoenas for a lot of this stuff. They're just going to sit down and say, here's a list of the documents we want to find. And I think that they're going to have that collaborative arrangement.
- [12:35]
Tucker Carlson
Incredible. There's panic. I sense panic and I sense it in some of these confirmation battles, particularly the sort of offline stuff that you don't see in the media. But just when you find out the lengths to which permanent Washington is going to say sabotage. Tulsi Gabbard, who's an army officer, who's had a clearance for more than a decade, carries an automatic weapon. I mean, clearly we trust her with America's, you know, defense. Why can't we trust her with America's secrets? Well, of course we can. So what is this? And it really is. People are panicked that what they've been doing is going to come to light. I think.
- [13:11]
Matt Taibbi
Well, they should be panicked because if you read the executive order on the weaponization of government, it specifically empowers the Director of National Intelligence to conduct a wide ranging report into the possible misdeeds of the entire intelligence community and orders her to come up with, you know, anything negative that they can find.
- [13:35]
Tucker Carlson
Holy.
- [13:35]
Matt Taibbi
So can you imagine? No. Right. I mean, that's like trying to make a list of everything. She'll be doing it from now to the end of time. But no, I mean, in perfect seriousness, this is. It's setting the stage for, you know, kind of a second church committee hearings era. And that was a great moment in American history.
- [13:59]
Tucker Carlson
Every 50 years, right, we find out what they're doing with their black budgets.
- [14:03]
Matt Taibbi
Yeah. And really in the mid-70s, who would have known, right, that we were doing such an incredibly wide ranging, you know, list of horrible, stupid things from, you know, trying to murder Castro with exploding seashells to spying on Martin Luther King Jr. To trying to you, you know, leaked news about mistresses of civil rights leaders. I mean, it goes. The list went on and on and on. And we only found out about it because they went too far. Right. And now suddenly people in the Senate had a hammer to start looking, you know, into this direction. And it all came out. Well, not all of it, but a lot of it came out.
- [14:47]
Tucker Carlson
A lot of it. Frank Church sadly got incredibly fast developing cancer. I noticed.
- [14:52]
Matt Taibbi
Did he?
- [14:52]
Tucker Carlson
Yes, he did. He did. Kind of like Jack Ruby style cancer, Hugo Chavez style cancer. It's interesting, huh?
- [14:59]
Matt Taibbi
I did not know.
- [15:00]
Tucker Carlson
Yeah. Couldn't treat it. He died. Sad. Sorry.
- [15:05]
Matt Taibbi
No, it's all right. I mean, look, it's hard not to think. I never thought this way until like a year ago, maybe a year and.
- [15:12]
Tucker Carlson
A half ago, I'm like, oh, no, I did not think this way. I attacked anyone who did.
- [15:17]
Matt Taibbi
Right. Yeah.
- [15:18]
Tucker Carlson
But I. Can I say one thing that I've noticed now that I'm in middle age, is that all my life, the older guys I've known, like you go on duck hunting trips or whatever in Washington where I lived, like with my dad and his friends or whatever, and the guys who were in their 50s and 60s, all thought this way. They all thought this way, you know, after, like, a lifetime of government service as an operations officer, whatever you're doing.
- [15:40]
Matt Taibbi
Right, right, right.
- [15:41]
Tucker Carlson
They all had this mindset. And I remember sitting, like in a duck blind, thinking, these guys are fucking crazy. They're all nuts. What I didn't realize was there's a reason that people become more open to these sorts of explanations the more they.
- [15:58]
Matt Taibbi
See, of course, and maybe. Right. Yeah.
- [16:02]
Tucker Carlson
I don't know why I didn't get that.
- [16:04]
Matt Taibbi
It's probably just our generation that thought the Schoolhouse Rock thing was true. I mean. Right?
- [16:11]
Tucker Carlson
That's so true.
- [16:12]
Matt Taibbi
Because, you know, we grew up with all the President's men, and after the church community, we thought it all had come out. The good guys won. There's transparency. We have the Freedom of Information Act. We can find everything out. No. Right? It turns out no. Right.
- [16:28]
Tucker Carlson
No, You're. I never thought of Schoolhouse Rock and all the President's men and sophisticated propaganda put there by the intel agencies. But I think you're right.
- [16:38]
Matt Taibbi
Whether they. Whoever did it, it was effective.
- [16:41]
Tucker Carlson
Want to hear something creepy? You are being bought and sold every day without your knowledge. Data brokers are watching everything you do online. They track every website that you visit, every link that you click, every video that you play. They collected information about you and your behavior and your thoughts, and they sell it to anybody who wants to buy it, including governments. No privacy whatsoever. Obviously, it should be illegal. It's not illegal. People are getting paid off to keep it legal. Politicians, specifically politicians, by the way, are some of the ones using your data. They buy it and then employ it in campaigns to swing your vote. That's creepy as hell. There's a way to get around it, though. It's called ExpressVPN. With ExpressVPN, our online activity here at this office goes through secure, encrypted servers. That means no data brokers can see what you're doing online or we're doing online. Not that we're doing anything wrong. ExpressVPN also hides our IP. There's no a for information we bought or sold. We cannot recommend it enough. It's our identity defender. It could be yours as well. Right now, you get an extra three months for free when you use our special link. Go to expressvpn.com Tucker get three extra months of ExpressVPN.
- [17:55]
Matt Taibbi
Tucker says it best.
- [17:56]
Tucker Carlson
The credit card companies are ripping Americans.
- [17:59]
Matt Taibbi
Off and enough is enough. This is Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas. Our legislation and the Credit Card Competition act would help end the Grip Visa and MasterCard have on us. Every Time you use your credit card, they charge you a hidden fee called a swipe fee, and they've been raising.
- [18:17]
Tucker Carlson
It without even telling you.
- [18:18]
Matt Taibbi
This hurts consumers and every small business owner.
- [18:22]
Tucker Carlson
In fact, American families are paying $1100.
- [18:25]
Matt Taibbi
In hidden swipe fees each year. The Fees Visa and MasterCard Charge American are the highest in the world. Double Canada's and eight times more than Europe's. That's why I've taken action. But I need your help to help get this passed. I'm asking you to call your senator today and demand they pass the Credit Card Competition act.
- [18:47]
Tucker Carlson
Paid for by the Merchants Payments Coalition. Not authorized by any candidate or Candidates Committee. Www.merrestancespaymentscoalition.don Junior here, guys.
- [19:06]
Matt Taibbi
Are you receiving letters from the IRS claiming you owe back taxes as penalties and interest fees pile up?
- [19:11]
Tucker Carlson
The IRS gives you no clear path to resolution.
- [19:14]
Matt Taibbi
Don't speak to them on your own.
- [19:16]
Tucker Carlson
They are not your friends.
- [19:17]
Matt Taibbi
To reach a team of licensed tax.
- [19:19]
Tucker Carlson
Professionals that can help you reduce, settle and resolve your tax matters, go to.
- [19:23]
Matt Taibbi
Tnusa.Com and check them out.
- [19:26]
Tucker Carlson
Solve your tax problems today. Call 1-800-780-8888 or visit tnusa.com that's 1-800-780-888.
- [19:35]
Matt Taibbi
This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Upgrade your business with Shopify, home of the number one checkout on the planet. Shop pay boosts conversions up to 50%, meaning fewer carts going abandoned and more sales going Cha Ching. So if you're into growing your business, get a commerce platform that's ready to sell wherever your customers are. Visit shopify.com to upgrade your selling today.
- [20:01]
Tucker Carlson
So can we just go through, since I sure think you're, as I've said many times, and I mean it, I think you're one of the great reporters still working. Not that there are many. Not. There's a ton of competition.
- [20:10]
Matt Taibbi
Yeah, there. There aren't many.
- [20:13]
Tucker Carlson
And you are by your nature a curious person, which is like requirement one for journalism and, like the one thing no one else seems curious about anything but you are. So can you just. Just go through, in no particular order, the stories whose endings you'd like to know. Like, what are you curious about as we enter an age of disclosure, God willing, we do. What do you want to know?
- [20:38]
Matt Taibbi
So, first of all, just to back up, I tried to make a list a couple of days ago. Yeah. Of all the things that I would want to investigate if I were, you know, in that kind of a position to order these kinds of things.
- [20:51]
Tucker Carlson
I'M actually going to take notes as you talk because I want to follow along at home as this happens. Okay.
- [20:55]
Matt Taibbi
But I couldn't finish. There were so many different things that I never got to the end. But I would say that the big ones, you know, they're huge, glaring questions, which is unusual. For instance, who was president the last four years? Especially the last year? I mean, I think that's an enormous question.
- [21:18]
Tucker Carlson
John Blinken.
- [21:19]
Matt Taibbi
Do you think it was Blinken?
- [21:20]
Tucker Carlson
You know, I, I think Blinken's so evil, so demonstrably evil and also stupid that I just see his fingerprints everywhere. Right, right. But that's just pure guess.
- [21:35]
Matt Taibbi
That's the problem. We don't really know.
- [21:36]
Tucker Carlson
I know that in the last two months, Blinken did everything he could to accelerate the war between the United States and Russia, which is like, should be illegal. I don't know how he got away with that. Nobody said anything about it, but that's a fact. So anyway, sorry.
- [21:50]
Matt Taibbi
No, but he, and he, you know, the, his State Department was also involved in the censorship stuff too. So who was president? Who was president?
- [21:59]
Tucker Carlson
Let's start with a big question.
- [22:00]
Matt Taibbi
Yeah. No, I mean, I think of all the crimes that are on the table and the potential corruption issues, people signing documents or somehow getting documents signed by an incompetent president or an unfit president has to rank up there with the most serious things that have ever happened in American history. Right. So you have to look at what were the, what was the process of the White House operation? Right. Who was actually running things? We know from a surface point who was, who held the posts. Right. So Ron Klain was the, the chief of staff. We know roughly who else was in Joe Biden's orbit. But what were the, what was the schedule? You know, did he, did he sign things by auto pen? Because they have this, this machine that does. And who, who was, who basically had the power of attorney to turn that on. Right. Like these are all questions that we have to get answers to. What was the day to day operation of the Biden White House? And again, especially in the last year, because I think, you know, that gets to bigger questions of who was really making these big foreign policy decisions and who was making decisions about things like, you know, cutting off the Democratic primaries? The challengers.
- [23:27]
Tucker Carlson
Yes.
- [23:27]
Matt Taibbi
You know, these are big party decisions, not necessarily White House decisions. Who decided to kick Biden off the ticket? Biden on July 13 was giving a speech in Detroit and he's like, I'm running. I mean, he couldn't have been more affirmative about the idea that he was not going to drop out of the race within seven days. He was out of the race within three days after that Detroit thing. There were stories leaked out in Politico that were basically saying that Nancy Pelosi was going to ask him to or going to try to pressure him to drop out. But I don't believe that. I think we need to find out exactly what those communications were. I mean, who had the authority to push the President of the United States off his own ticket unless he had a sudden change of heart? Do you believe that?
- [24:22]
Tucker Carlson
I think it's really obvious that his statement dropping out on Twitter was issued before he knew. I mean, I've heard that. Again, I don't know is the truth, but I've heard that it's very conspicuous.
- [24:34]
Matt Taibbi
That when he, when he wanted to say things, he said it on camera. But there were all kinds of things where the wording was much more careful. And that was done on Twitter or in a letter or in a press release. I mean, even. Even the, the note explaining the pardons. Who wrote that? Right. It was on a, you know, Biden's Twitter account. I doubt he's sitting there tweeting.
- [24:56]
Tucker Carlson
So it's just a coup. I mean, that's a coup if you take a sitting president, United States, and force him to drop out. I mean. Right.
- [25:05]
Matt Taibbi
It's on the table. It has to be. Because, you know, Jill Biden has been very circumspect in talking about it. She's said these really curious things about how she wants to reevaluate her relationships. I think she was referring to Nancy Pelosi. But what exactly happened in that one week period between, you know, the middle of July and the 21st or so, and then what happened in between the 21st and the 22nd or whenever it was when Biden suddenly came out and, and made Kamala the nominee? Like, how did that happen? Who made that decision?
- [25:45]
Tucker Carlson
So that was after the Republican convention.
- [25:48]
Matt Taibbi
Yes, yes.
- [25:50]
Tucker Carlson
So you had this incredible week or two where Trump gets shot, survives, you have the convention, and Biden drops out. I mean, that's. And as far as I know, I don't think anyone's ever done, like a real TikTok on that.
- [26:07]
Matt Taibbi
No, there were. There were stories, but they were incredibly incomplete. And this is one of the things where, you know, I was looking at it even from just a professionalism point of view in terms of the New York Times, the Washington Post, all of these, these papers. How does nobody ask who made the decision to nominate Kamala Harris, how did that happen? How was he kicked off or how did he come. Come to that decision? Normally there would be a big show of that, right? There would be. Somebody would come out and give an interview to, I don't know, 60 Minutes and say, well, here's how that happened, right. And whether it was true or not, there would be a grand explanation. Whenever there's something big that happens with the president here, they just, they just kind of did a little tweet or a press release, and there were things that were leaked out in newspapers. None of it made any sense. So, you know, they have to get all those communications. And I think that's what was important there. You know, there were preservation letters that were sent out by some Senate committees. I hope it captured a lot of this stuff, but we'll see.
- [27:17]
Tucker Carlson
Do you have any sense of what the answer is to either one of these questions? Who was functionally operating the Biden administration and who kicked Biden out? Who made these decisions?
- [27:29]
Matt Taibbi
I've only heard theories about this. Right. And that's the problem. It's kind of irresponsible for reporters to speculate, because I agree. We don't know all we know, we saw little bits and pieces of things. Like there was. There was a really weird moment, you might remember, when Biden said something to the effect of we can't allow Putin to stay in office or whatever it was. Right. And. And people immediately interpreted that as a regime change, of course. Comment. Right. 47 minutes later, the White House comes out with a walk back clarifying statement saying, you know, our policy towards Russia is unchanged or something, something ambiguous like that. But there were leaks in the press about what happened there. And there was a remarkable line in one of the stories saying that Biden was allowed to participate in the workshopping of that second statement. How is he not in charge of it, first of all? Right, like. And, you know, they're talking about, Jake Sullivan is involved in the process, but that just gives you a little glimpse into this idea of a collective presidency where at best, Biden was a participant. So I, I think we need to know a lot of things about who was actually making those decisions. It might be different in terms of, you know, for each realm of the government. Right. Maybe the national security questions were dealt with by one person, then, you know, the foreign policy things by another. I don't know. I mean, we'll see.
- [29:06]
Tucker Carlson
And then domestic policy, which doesn't even really exist in this country, it's all national security, like, runs everything.
- [29:12]
Matt Taibbi
Right, right.
- [29:13]
Tucker Carlson
Who's Doing that? Yeah.
- [29:15]
Matt Taibbi
Oh, that was only the first thing in the list, right?
- [29:19]
Tucker Carlson
No, you just got. You know, it's so funny as you say this, and I won't interrupt you anymore, but I just can't. I mean, it's like crazy. You're going through this stuff. This just happened this summer.
- [29:27]
Matt Taibbi
Yeah.
- [29:28]
Tucker Carlson
And I was there. I mean, I know a lot of the people. I feel like I'm not that informed, but maybe more informed than average because it's my job. I kind of forgot about all this stuff. Like, so much stuff has happened. It's like, it's amazing what we have allowed to sort of pass by us without demanding answers.
- [29:48]
Matt Taibbi
I mean, I remember being in Russia in the late 90s. There were multiple episodes that you might classify as quasi coups. Yes, right. There were. There was an. An episode where people tried to arrest Yeltsin's bodyguard, Alexander Karjakov, and it kind of turned out the other way in the end. And. But there was intense reporting about this by the supposedly unfree Russian press at the time. And then there was also the whole question of, you know, why was Putin brought in? You know, what did he do when he immediately. He was immediately kind of used to clamp down on the. An investigation of Yeltsin that was done by the general prosecutor at the time. I mean, that's all in the woods. What I'm trying to say is even in a third world country, we got more information about stuff that was going on than we got last year in the United States of America, where we had a gigantic press corps sitting in Washington supposedly covering all this stuff. It blows my mind, you know, I.
- [30:57]
Tucker Carlson
Mean, you've done this your whole life, so, you know, and you grew up in it, so you. You must still know people in that gigantic press corps.
- [31:04]
Matt Taibbi
A few. But, you know, the ones that I. That I. I'm still in touch with mostly have been kind of squeezed out. You know, there are people who. Who did try to get to the bottom of what happened. I mean, Cyhersch did a. A story about the mechanics of how it got to be went from Biden to Kamala. And you know, that story came out on Substack, but it wasn't picked up anywhere. And that's kind of the way the media works.
- [31:33]
Tucker Carlson
Also broke the story that the United States, NATO, the Biden administration, was behind the sabotage of Nordstrom.
- [31:41]
Matt Taibbi
Right.
- [31:42]
Tucker Carlson
Natural gas pipeline to Western Europe, to Germany. And that.
- [31:45]
Matt Taibbi
I mean, that's on the list too, obviously.
- [31:47]
Tucker Carlson
But that's. I mean, I think we can say that's true. And I mean, why isn't Cy Hersch getting the Pulitzer for that? Why? You know, he was immediately. This guy's been a hero on the left for my entire life. Before I was born, he was a hero in the left. And all of a sudden everyone's like, shut up, Putin apologist.
- [32:07]
Matt Taibbi
Oh, I know, I know.
- [32:08]
Tucker Carlson
I mean, I'm sorry. I'm. You know, all this is just. Oh, it drives me insane. It drives me insane. Not only are there almost no good reporters left, the few good reporters left are like attacked all the time.
- [32:18]
Matt Taibbi
Yeah, no, they've all been kicked to the curb. You know, it's. I think it's very notable that a lot of the high profile investigative reporters just can't even publish in the United States. You know, and, you know, look at somebody like Jeff Girth who writes, who made a point of kind of keeping ties to traditional media and not burning bridges and doing all that stuff, and worked his. His butt off to get this 24,000 word piece about Russiagate into the Columbia Journalism Review. And it should have landed hard. It should have landed like a Mike Tyson uppercut, you know, and it. People just ignored it. So even when they don't kick you out of the club, they just, they ignore the hard earth.
- [33:07]
Tucker Carlson
For people who were, you know, under 40, was definitely one of the most famous investigative reporters in the world and feared.
- [33:15]
Matt Taibbi
Yeah. The New York Times front page.
- [33:17]
Tucker Carlson
Worse.
- [33:18]
Matt Taibbi
Jeff Girth.
- [33:18]
Tucker Carlson
Yeah. Big deal guy. For many, many years, he was the.
- [33:22]
Matt Taibbi
Bulldog going after the Clinton administration on everything. Right. So, I mean, when he did a story, it mattered. It was on the desk of every senator in the country. Of course, you know, and that, that's what's so interesting about this period is that there, there is none of that. The stuff that lands on the desks of people in the relevant committees in Washington is pr. There's no reporting there for the most part. Maybe that will change now, I don't know. But, you know, I doubt it.
- [33:54]
Tucker Carlson
People read your stuff, I happen to know. So that's good.
- [33:58]
Matt Taibbi
That would be great to.
- [33:59]
Tucker Carlson
They do.
- [34:00]
Matt Taibbi
Yeah. Yeah.
- [34:01]
Tucker Carlson
So, okay.
- [34:02]
Matt Taibbi
But Nordstream, don't forget.
- [34:04]
Tucker Carlson
Okay, let's go to Nordstrom. And now I'm gonna stop interrupting Nordstream. What do we know?
- [34:08]
Matt Taibbi
I mean, I mean, we know that there's five or six shifting official explanations of what happened. They eventually settled on this kind of labyrinthine. The story about a rogue Ukrainian operation that apparently without our input, went and did this. Yeah. I don't believe it. I mean, it's. It's it's laughable to think that that's true. And so you know that. But that's the kind of Nord Stream is just one. It's like looking up at the stars in the sky. That's just one of them. And that's a huge story. I mean, think about it.
- [34:49]
Tucker Carlson
That could have started the German economy. It will destroy the EU Ultimately, when people wake up from their dream state, it will destroy NATO because it was an attack by one NATO power on a NATO ally. Another NATO member was attacked by the United States on Germany. And it wrecked the German economy.
- [35:06]
Matt Taibbi
Absolutely. It strained and strained the incoming relations. And it's just, it could have resulted in, you know, an immediate nuclear escalation. I mean, there's so many different things. And it was a massive ecological disaster. It was a Deepwater Horizon level environmental event.
- [35:26]
Tucker Carlson
It's the greatest man made emission of carbon dioxide in history.
- [35:30]
Matt Taibbi
Right. And it's a tiny footnote to the insane lunacies that happened during this period. I'm sorry, but it is like Nord Stream is. If you're making a list of the 10 weirdest things that happened in the last eight years, it's probably at the bottom, I would think. I mean, wow. I mean, don't you think?
- [35:52]
Tucker Carlson
I mean, I think that's right. I just, you know, I like Western Europe. I think it's important to have a thriving Western Europe. I don't think they're a rival. I think they're a complimentary region to the United States. And to see it destroyed intentionally by the Biden administration. Well, let's just wreck Western Europe. Like, why would you do that? And I, so I'm, I'm fixated on it. But, but you're right. So what are the others?
- [36:16]
Matt Taibbi
So Covid.
- [36:19]
Tucker Carlson
Okay.
- [36:20]
Matt Taibbi
I mean, there are, there are so many different areas where they're going to have to investigate, reinvestigate that. We just went through a period where, you know, there was sort of mass stonewalling of, of Congress when it was trying to investigate what happened with COVID You know, people. There were key people like Peter Daszak from the Eco Health alliance who just didn't answer subpoenas. Right. And so we're gonna, there are documents that, that we know exist that we're going to get now with FBI communications between the Bureau and a lot of these scientists dating back 10 years. And it's going to tell a very, a crazy story. I mean, a really interesting story. There's a reason why Fauci's pardon is backdated to 2014. Because that's the time period that they're going to have to start looking, which is when did we start defying the ban on gain of function research? We clearly did. I think that's pretty established at this point. Why were we doing it? What connection did that have to the Wuhan thing? What kind of advance notice did we get? What kind of lies were told about it? Who were responsible for those lies? What information did we get about the inefficacy of the vaccine? And how did that connect to statements by the CDC and the White House? This also connects to the censorship issue in a major way because there was also a sort of massive effort to control public. The public conversation about this that went through the health agencies. So we know they're looking at that. And that's another executive order, by the way. The, the free speech order, you know, directs them, the Department of Justice, to come up with a comprehensive review of all the censorship stuff. So we're going to find out about that. But I just think Covet is a gigantic rat's nest of stuff. And, you know, it's going to be like a turkey shoot where every direction they look, they're going to find something, you know, revelatory.
- [38:37]
Tucker Carlson
The question is, will that information reach the public? Because there is the intermediaries, the media. So like congressional investigators, executive branch agencies like doj, you know, they're constantly inspectors general. They're always releasing reports. And I'm like, no one reads them because nobody picks them up in the media. Do we have enough interested reporters to, like, disseminate what they find?
- [39:02]
Matt Taibbi
See, I think we do, because I think that what we think of as the media is dead. It. They no longer really matter. The, the, the. The media that matters now are people like you and, and Joe Rogan and other, you know, there was podcasters out there. There's this gigantic, thriving independent media culture. It's incredible that, you know, turn the last election, clearly, yes. It was also abundantly clear that the, that the old media no longer had any ability to control the narrative about anything. They're totally discredited. So I think this stuff is going to come out, and because it's going to be so explosive, it's going to sort of solidify and heighten the prestige of all this new media. I think we're probably going to see whole institutions that are going to be built around these disclosures. We're going to have new newspapers, new, new TV stations.
- [40:00]
Tucker Carlson
So normally, save this for the end, but I'm feeling so enthusiastic. I'm going to do it now in case people don't get to the end. Where do people find you? How do they support you if you've made it this far in this conversation, you're like, this guy's unbelievable. How did. I'm sorry. Shamelessly promote for.
- [40:16]
Matt Taibbi
Oh, thanks. No, I'm at Racket News on Substack where a lot of these news sites are.
- [40:23]
Tucker Carlson
For those who didn't grow up playing squash. How are you spelling racket?
- [40:27]
Matt Taibbi
R A C K E T dot news.
- [40:30]
Tucker Carlson
So racket, not squash.
- [40:32]
Matt Taibbi
Racket, not squash. Racket. Like racket. Like that's a racket. Right. Which this is. Yes, it turned out to be aptly named. So nice. But yeah, no, I, I'm feeling very optimistic now. I think there's, there are still some holes in this new media landscape. We don't have the huge institutions that have reporters who have beats, which I think is crucial. Right. Because you need to have people who develop sources in one small area.
- [41:02]
Tucker Carlson
And well, you saw that with Julie Kelly on January 6th. Julie Kelly, I don't know what she did before. She's purely kind of a creation of the Internet. Well, she's a self creation, but she, her medium was the Internet and X specifically. And she's got mad about January 6th and just relentlessly focused on that. I'm sure she's other opinions but she only did that. And I mean man, this one woman and who thinks she's my age. Ish. Like unearthed all this information that was like, no, no one else got it except her because she was just so focused on this thing.
- [41:37]
Matt Taibbi
It's great, it's incredible. And it's a. That's exactly how the press is supposed to function. They're not supposed to be credentialed. Like it's not supposed to be a thing where, you know, somebody confers a title. You are the official media. No, the citizen. Like that's part of our job is to be the press. Right? Like that's why the, the, the. For the First Amendment was designed for exactly for that to happen. And there were, there was lots of incredible reporting that was done by either individuals or small indicate, you know, organizations like the US Right to Know, they filed, you know, hundreds of FOIA requests on FAUCI and gain of function and everything. And they really started the ball rolling on that whole side of that investigation. It's, you know, it's a relatively small site and they had good, good young reporters there who were hungry. And that's how this thing works, you know.
- [42:36]
Tucker Carlson
Amazing, right? Amazing.
- [42:38]
Matt Taibbi
It's exciting.
- [42:39]
Tucker Carlson
It's so exciting. And it's also true that there are increasingly people making like a legit living, probably not getting rich, but like paying the bills, doing this job right, which is important.
- [42:52]
Matt Taibbi
And that's also how it's supposed to work. I mean, I remember hearing a story about if Stone when I was starting on Substack. I was calling around to some of the old timers and saying, like, is this a good idea for me to tap out of mainstream media? And they told me a story that. And they said, you know, if Stone cranked out a newsletter for those people who don't know, he was a. Izzy Stone. Izzy Stone. He was a, you know, one of the original and independent investigative journalists. He worked out of his house. He put out this little newsletter, the I have Stone Weekly. It was great reporting, independent, didn't have to answer to editors who told him to shape things one way or the other. And he made a nice living, got himself a nice little house and that was enough. Right. And he had an impact. And you can do that now. The Internet makes it easier, actually.
- [43:46]
Tucker Carlson
It's amazing.
- [43:47]
Matt Taibbi
Yeah.
- [43:48]
Tucker Carlson
In America, we do things a little differently and we always have. When the British said, hey, we're going to tax your favorite morning beverage, the revolutionary sons of liberty said no. And they poured the entire shipment of tea into Boston harbor and created a new country. A country based on personal choice and freedom. Well, 251 years later, it is time to throw. Throw something else overboard. Your overpriced big wireless contract. You don't need it. Do you need to pay hundred dollars a month just to get a free phone? I don't think so. The cell phone company we use, PureTalk, says no to all of this. Inflated prices, the BS, the contracts you can't understand and instead gives you service that you need, that you actually need. With PureTalk, it's super straightforward. You get unlimited talk text, 25 gigs of data, mobile hotspot at a fraction of the price. And with a qualifying plan of just $45 a month, they'll throw a free Samsung Galaxy your way. So you get everything and you know exactly what it is. It's not designed to deceive you. We strongly recommend it. PureTalk provides the same coverage as the other guys. It's just a lot more affordable and a lot more straightforward. You can find out for yourself, visit PureTalk.com Tucker make the switch today. PureTalk, America's wireless company. You wonder again, I'm delaying you in your narrative once more with apologies. But you wonder even Just the four topics you've mentioned so far are so big that if we got the truth or some, you know, higher percentage of the truth about those things, you wonder about the social effect. So one of the things the censors always say is they're doing this or preventing you from knowing certain things to preserve societal stability.
- [45:49]
Matt Taibbi
Yeah. And trust and institutions.
- [45:51]
Tucker Carlson
Trust in institutions. Exactly. Trust in institutions. So, I mean, that's already gone away, but it will evaporate completely the more we know, don't you think?
- [46:01]
Matt Taibbi
Yes, yes, but it'll be like. I mean, hopefully it'll be like the church committee hearings where, look, we just have to accept people are going to have their minds blown by discoveries, revelations, for instance. It's already starting in the news media. We're starting to get stories from journalists who were told they had to suppress. I saw certain angles. Right. You know, there was a Politico story about some people who were told to stay away from the Hunter Biden laptop story.
- [46:35]
Tucker Carlson
Two Politico reporters, having left Politico, admitted that Politico, which is supposedly covering Washington, told them, no, we're not. We're not doing that.
- [46:43]
Matt Taibbi
Right, exactly. And, you know, my first question is, why didn't you say that when it happened? But I guess people have jobs, right? So that's. That's a thing. But there are going to be a lot more of those. I mean, there are already kind of whispers going around, but people are going to learn that institutions they believed in their whole lives were fraudulent, that they lied to them about important things. And it's going to be difficult at first, especially since there are not solid new institutions in place to replace them. Yes. You know, it's one thing if you're taking down the CIA in the 70s and there's a supposedly reformed CIA there. Right. This is different. The media is going to have to rebuild itself from the ground up. I think it's already doing great, but it doesn't have that look for a lot of people. Right? That's right.
- [47:42]
Tucker Carlson
It looks very different.
- [47:43]
Matt Taibbi
Yeah. And so, you know, it's going to be as you. I think that's a good point. It's a transitional period for people, I guess.
- [47:51]
Tucker Carlson
Look, if you want trust in institutions, and I definitely do, I do. I grew up trusting institutions. I don't now. That's their fault, not mine. I think your country doesn't work if nobody trusts any of the institutions. Right. It just doesn't. So we want that. The only way to that is through transparency, honesty. So I get all that, and I'M for it vehemently. I guess what I'm saying is the people who've been administering the system and benefiting from it are completely freaked out. Right. That's why they're trying to stop Tulsi. But I wonder if they get threatened enough, if they don't become like, just flat out dangerous to everybody else. Like, the only way to stop disclosure at this point would. Would be with like a catastrophe that's so all encompassing, 9, 11 Covid, that it just everything shuts down. All trends in progress stop.
- [48:42]
Matt Taibbi
Yeah.
- [48:43]
Tucker Carlson
And I just feel like there's a lot at stake for these people. If you're, you know, John Brennan or Jim Clapper and you're like a criminal or Mike Pompeo, you're a criminal. That's my opinion. But I think they're obviously criminals. Like, you know, you've got a lot to lose.
- [48:57]
Matt Taibbi
Absolutely.
- [48:58]
Tucker Carlson
Yeah.
- [48:59]
Matt Taibbi
Yeah. And people in the intelligence agencies whose names are not known to the public, they're about to be.
- [49:06]
Tucker Carlson
Exactly.
- [49:08]
Matt Taibbi
And you know that we don't know what that's going to result in, what impact that's going to have.
- [49:16]
Tucker Carlson
Well, so this was my thinking about, you know, the, the period between the election and the inauguration this week. I think that's one of the reasons that Tony Blinken was pushing so hard for a real war. Trying to kill Putin, for example, which the Biden administration did. They tried to kill Putin?
- [49:32]
Matt Taibbi
Really?
- [49:33]
Tucker Carlson
Yes, yes, they did.
- [49:34]
Matt Taibbi
Wow.
- [49:35]
Tucker Carlson
Which is insane. If like, okay, so who takes over Russia?
- [49:38]
Matt Taibbi
Right.
- [49:38]
Tucker Carlson
And what happens? The nuclear arsenal in a country that's like so complex, outsiders can't even understand. I mean, you live there. You know, that's demented that you would even think of something like that.
- [49:49]
Matt Taibbi
Absolutely.
- [49:49]
Tucker Carlson
So why were they. Because chaos is a screen that protects them. I mean, I don't know this. That's just like watching what they're doing. I'm like, why would they be doing that? Part of it is because, like, it's. It's like when you're taking off the roof of the embassy in Saigon, you burn all the papers, right?
- [50:04]
Matt Taibbi
Absolutely.
- [50:04]
Tucker Carlson
But they can't because they're digital. So maybe you need, need like a war to hide your tracks or to.
- [50:09]
Matt Taibbi
Keep the public's attention.
- [50:11]
Tucker Carlson
That's what I mean.
- [50:11]
Matt Taibbi
Elsewhere, right? Yes, exactly. Yeah. I had the same fears. And that was part of my thinking when they started, you know, approving the firing of American missiles into Russian territory and British missiles and French missiles. I'm like, why would you do, like, what possible reason would there be to do this, you're not, not really going to make any military gains by doing this. So it's, you're doing it either to provoke the other side or to create a headline. The headline, I don't think it gets you anything.
- [50:45]
Tucker Carlson
No.
- [50:45]
Matt Taibbi
So what were they doing? And you know, if you're, if as you're saying they were fiddling with regime change in the, in the interim.
- [50:54]
Tucker Carlson
Yes.
- [50:55]
Matt Taibbi
Yeah, I think that was a fear that a lot of people had. I, I didn't think that frankly that Trump would become president, you know, for a variety of different reasons. I don't know exactly what could have happened to stop that, but it was hard for me to accept that it did happen.
- [51:16]
Tucker Carlson
I was sitting about six feet away and I just thought, wow, I can't believe this is actually happening. Right up until the second he said the oath, I was like, man, you know, I mean, you just get superstitious or paranoid or whatever it is, having seen all this stuff.
- [51:29]
Matt Taibbi
And I was embarrassed to have those thoughts.
- [51:31]
Tucker Carlson
I agree. I totally agree. I was like, wow, I'm becoming crazy. But it's not totally crazy when you see the pattern. So. But I guess the point I would make is it's like we're not, the process has not unfolded fully yet. So, like, there's still a lot that we don't know. Disclosure is, as you've said, like, imminent. And that sets up an incentive for the people being exposed to do something really crazy.
- [51:54]
Matt Taibbi
It does, but I think the moment is passed.
- [51:58]
Tucker Carlson
Good.
- [51:58]
Matt Taibbi
For the real, like there was a moment where they could have installed a European style regime to stop misinformation. This is the new trend, right. Remember the hurricanes happened and immediately FEMA is talking about setting up an anti misinformation center. Right. It just happened in California. Crazy, right? I mean, you know, the fact that Gavin Newsom had time to try to come up with a state bureau for protecting my reputation. But, but they could really have done that. They could have basically put a net over everything with, I mean, that, that's the thing that's scary about the, the European situation is, is they already have that massive infrastructure in place to completely control the flow of information. What people see, what people don't see, that they can punish people who step out of line. And we were, you know, this far away from being part of something like that. And if they were going to do that, if they had done that, and I think there, there was probably some thinking that that would have been accomplished by 2024. If you go back and look at some of The European Union's papers on the subject. They were anticipating that we were going to be signatories to certain agreements, like, you know, the code of practice on disinformation, that we would have our own version by now. If they had done that, then none of this would be possible. You know, all these independent outlets, they could scream to high heavens, but no one would see it. It would be like, you know.
- [53:44]
Tucker Carlson
No, it's totally right.
- [53:45]
Matt Taibbi
Right. I mean, you know this because you. When you were doing shows about COVID Well, now we can look behind the scenes and see that the White House was demanding that Facebook dial it down. They turned it down to 50%. I mean, that's in print. What did you think when you saw that, by the way?
- [54:03]
Tucker Carlson
When I totally ignored it. I ignore all coverage that in any way pertains to me. I don't want to become self conscious. So I didn't spend, you know, one second thinking. But I've had a couple other things, and one other thing in particular in the last year that was like, so shocking. I never thought about it again. Because you just don't. I'm sure you've been through this. I mean, you were. Speaking of mistreated. I'm not going to bring it up, but you were identified as disobedient. And I mean, they tried to end you. I watched it. Yeah. So you shrug it off or whatever, but you shrug it off. But from my perspective, it's always. You see things clearly when you're looking at someone else's life.
- [54:40]
Matt Taibbi
Sure, Absolutely.
- [54:41]
Tucker Carlson
I didn't even know you at the time. I was like, why are they trying to kill this guy?
- [54:45]
Matt Taibbi
Yeah, right.
- [54:46]
Tucker Carlson
Well, they were. And that's my interpretation of it anyway. But you can't brood on it.
- [54:53]
Matt Taibbi
No, but the fact that the mechanics they were trying to install, the mechanisms by which all this stuff would have been locked down and we saw during the COVID period how. How effective it was. Yes. I mean, look, we've the. The new head of the nih, you know, Jay Bhattacharya. We mostly didn't hear about his research. Right. I mean, this. This is the guy who.
- [55:22]
Tucker Carlson
Can you believe Jay Potichary, who I love. A thoroughly decent man, by the way, in addition to being right on the science. But he's a decent guy.
- [55:30]
Matt Taibbi
He's like the sweetest guy in the world. Yeah, no, absolutely.
- [55:32]
Tucker Carlson
Head of nih.
- [55:33]
Matt Taibbi
Yeah, I know. Isn't that amazing? Yeah. He goes from being censored to being the head of nih. It's an. It's an amazing transition. But the, but the thing that, that's so extraordinary about it is America would have had a completely different idea about lockdowns if they had understood how infectious the disease was, how fruitless it was to try to physically prevent people from, you know, getting infected and, and, and how unlikely that was to succeed and how, you know, compared to all the other negatives that could have happened from keeping people at home and everything like that. Like, they wouldn't have made that decision going forward, but they were able to effectively suppress that point of view, which is really scary. Right. I mean, there was real research out there and most people didn't see it. I didn't see it until a year and a half later.
- [56:31]
Tucker Carlson
No, I know.
- [56:31]
Matt Taibbi
Right, no, so. And that's, that's what could happen. That's what could have happened with all this stuff.
- [56:38]
Tucker Carlson
So. But I know that you, without getting too specific, but you're, you know, you're in touch with doctors, like on a personal level, like, you know, doctors just practicing, you know, clinical physicians. Right.
- [56:50]
Matt Taibbi
My wife's the doctor.
- [56:51]
Tucker Carlson
Okay. I didn't know if you wanted to say that you're married to a doctor. So did they know? Like, they, it was kept from them too? Like, they didn't. Yeah, I mean, your average, like emergency room physician was like, aware that a lot of the COVID propaganda was fake.
- [57:05]
Matt Taibbi
Well, yeah, I mean, I know some ER doctors as well, and they had to go looking for information and it was very hard to find. And you know, to this day, if you go on Google and you go looking for things, you're not likely to find the sort of counter narrative thing easily. And I think for a lot of doctors during that period, it was frustrating because even peer reviewed research was not always easy to find for them. So, yeah, during that period it affected the whole question of like, experts who talked to the press, like they weren't always informed about what was going on or about different studies that had been done. And yeah, we had a completely different idea about the pandemic than maybe we should have. But the point being is not so much that that was destructive in itself though, I think it was, but that it was a proof of concept of something that that was to come.
- [58:11]
Tucker Carlson
You know, do you think that as we unearth more about COVID that the biggest question of all, which was what was the point of that? Clearly was the point. I mean, if every part of the society was coordinated and aimed toward the same goal, which was increasing the fear, preserving the lies about its origin, hiding a lot of stuff and like telling you and pushing it toward the vaccine. So like, and it was utterly coordinated, if anyone's coordinated, that was from the churches to the schools to the media, everything, everyone's on the same page. Like why?
- [58:46]
Matt Taibbi
I don't know. I mean that's, that's what we have to, that's why these documents will be so fascinating to get, that we'll ever.
- [58:52]
Tucker Carlson
Get to, that we'll ever be able to say with some certainty or confidence like this is why they did that.
- [59:00]
Matt Taibbi
We may not know some of the higher level thinking about things. I mean, you're probably not going to get a document that says, look, it's really important that we do this because if we really stress masking, then we'll have established the precedent of that visible symbols of conformity are, you know, a positive goal for an authoritarian regime. I mean, they're not going to have that on paper anywhere, right? Yes, but there, you know, there might be emails back and forth about how we get people to, to follow instructions about how, how we manage the problem of academic freedom. Right. They're probably going to be emails back and forth saying we have to change America's thinking about this and get them to start thinking more in the direction of trusting authority. Right. There's probably going to be some stuff about that because we've already seen that in, you know, FOIA disclosures with some of, you know, some of these anti disinformation groups and that sort of thing. So I imagine there's, there's going to be some stuff with the White House, the cdc, the nih, there might be some things like that in there. But the higher level, sort of broader conspiratorial questions, I don't, I don't know what we're going to get, but I'm fascinated to find out.
- [60:24]
Tucker Carlson
Me too. I want to tell you about an amazing documentary series from our friend Sean Stone called All the President's the Conspiracy Against. It is a series of interviews with people at the very heart of the first Trump term, many of whom are close to the heart of the second Trump term. This is their stories about what permanent Washington tried to do to them, in many cases send them to prison for the crime of supporting Donald Trump. Their words have never been more relevant than they are now. Steve Bannon, Kash Patel. I'm in there. Even all the President's Men. The Conspiracy against. Against Trump. And you will find it only on TCN tucker carlson.com highly recommended. So, okay, so Covid next.
- [61:25]
Matt Taibbi
Okay. Russiagate, Russiagate. And you know the sort of related phenomenon of fake news, intelligence leaks designed to destroy careers, which bleeds into kind of lawfare. Right. But Russiagate specifically, that's a big story. That's a place where I think that's going to be the easiest hit for investigators because we know where the documents are. In some cases, we even have them already. We just, they're redacted. So we get to look under the redactions. Now, why did they start the original investigation? What was the, what was the impetus for the July 31 opening in 2016 of Crossfire Hurricane? You know, there's some conflicting stories in the past. Did it really come from Britain? Did John Brennan really advise the CIA to look into it, or was it something else? Why did the FBI open an investigation into Trump specifically after he had taken office in May of 2017? It's just an extraordinary thing. Thinking back to that time, we don't remember it, but the FBI opened a probe into the sitting President of the United States to ask the question of whether he was working for a foreign power at that time. And what evidence could they have possibly had for that, apart from the fact that he fired Jim Comey?
- [63:01]
Tucker Carlson
If there's, did they even, I mean, they had no evidence.
- [63:04]
Matt Taibbi
If there's nothing under those redactions, more than that, then that itself was an. It's an extraordinary scandal just by itself. Right.
- [63:13]
Tucker Carlson
So the predicate for all of this, I think maybe even earlier, but to my knowledge, late in the summer of 16, with the hacking of the DNC and the emails from the DNC, and the FBI never investigated it never investigated the actual, you know, the physical removal of this data from their servers. Instead, a company called CrowdStrike, which worked for the Democratic Party, did. And then exactly at that moment, or right around that moment, a DNC staffer was killed in Washington, D.C. in an apparent robbery in which nothing was taken from him that I happen to know for a fact. The mpd, the Metropolitan Police Department, thought was, like, bizarre, and they kind of didn't believe it. A Fox News host went on air and asked questions about this killing. Why wouldn't you and the parents of the man who was killed either sued or. I think they sued. They certainly threatened to sue and basically scared the crap out of everyone. So no one's ever asked a question about it since.
- [64:13]
Matt Taibbi
They hired a private investigator who looked around in that case, I remember, and there were, there were some odd details there. The FBI ended up in possession of, of his laptop.
- [64:28]
Tucker Carlson
And then the FBI wind up in. I mean, this is a Local crime. Right.
- [64:33]
Matt Taibbi
Yeah. This was one of the first reasons I started to look at that case because I got a call from somebody about that and you know, I don't know why that was the case, but it is the case.
- [64:47]
Tucker Carlson
But, and there were people at the dnc, one of whom I know, who thought that he was murdered for political reasons at the dnc. A very high ranking person of the DNC told me that. And I probably should just say, but I, everyone can guess who it is who's informed on this, but I don't want to betray confidence, but I'm not making this up and I don't know what happened, but like, as far as I know, not one person has looked into that in the media.
- [65:14]
Matt Taibbi
No. And you know, even if it is just an unsolved murder of a type that they normally solve, the whole situation, that, that whole timeline was very strange. It doesn't really make sense. The, you know, the hacking of, of the DNC, the bringing in of CrowdStrike, the what when the information was released online, they never really proved that case, but they immediately made inferences about it. And there was a, an incredibly sophisticated kind of public campaign to create this narrative that, you know, upon closer examination, turns out not to be true. So we got to go back and find out what did exactly happen there. Why did they order this Crossfire Hurricane probe? Why were they sending informants in after Trump or people in his orbit? And we know they did.
- [66:17]
Tucker Carlson
Who were all those informants? It'd be interesting. I have some suspicions.
- [66:21]
Matt Taibbi
Yeah, well, we know who some of them were. Right. But we don't know who all of them were. I mean, I, I did a story to the effect that the, the people in the House Intelligence Committee who were looking at this, who, you know, Cash Patel's initial probe, that they came up with a number that it was 26 different people who were being investigated in, in Trump's orbit. Orbit. No matter what happened, it's, it's a huge story because it's a, it's the political espionage story. It's not unlike Watergate really.
- [66:54]
Tucker Carlson
Exactly.
- [66:55]
Matt Taibbi
And they, and we've, we've laughed it off or the, you know, the mainstream press has, has shrugged and snorted at the idea that this is a scandal that needs to be taken seriously. But it does. It absolutely does. Just because it's Donald Trump doesn't mean you can ignore the FBI conducting political investigations willy nilly and inventing predicates to, to look into people's campaigns and using FISA and all, all kinds of other Crazy. Can I say, crazy shit. Yeah. I mean, that stuff was all nuts, and we, we need to find out exactly what happened with that. And that is one of the reasons, I think, that people are nervous about this weaponization of government probe, because it's absolutely going to look in that direction.
- [67:45]
Tucker Carlson
Yes.
- [67:46]
Matt Taibbi
And, you know, that's one of the first things they're, they're going to, to look at is who was behind that, you know, who cooked up the Steele dossier, how was that released? You know, and then there's the whole question of, you know, leading up to impeachment and the, the leaks that were done. A lot of them were kind of illegal on their face. Right. Like, you can't leak signals intelligence to newspapers. And it was done repeatedly during that time.
- [68:19]
Tucker Carlson
They did it to me.
- [68:20]
Matt Taibbi
Right, yeah, exactly.
- [68:21]
Tucker Carlson
The nsa.
- [68:21]
Matt Taibbi
Yeah.
- [68:22]
Tucker Carlson
Read my text and leaked them to the New York Times twice.
- [68:24]
Matt Taibbi
Right, right.
- [68:26]
Tucker Carlson
Yeah. And they, you know, admitted it one time, but it was under fisa, so it was like.
- [68:31]
Matt Taibbi
Yeah, which, which is, by the way, hilarious because the, the initially they were denying that it even happened. Right. And then, of course, later, it turns out it was more advantageous to leak the contents. So. But people had developed, they developed very short memories during this time period. They were not able to retain information, among other things, because journalists got out of the habit of repeating the story that used. That was one of the things that we were taught, you know, when I, I was taught growing up, when you're doing a story about anything, you have to recount all of the facts as if the, the reader has never encountered this story before.
- [69:15]
Tucker Carlson
Each story should stand alone.
- [69:16]
Matt Taibbi
Yes, exactly. You have to, you have to retell the whole thing so that they don't have to go looking for another story. That's exactly to, to find out what this means.
- [69:24]
Tucker Carlson
Exactly.
- [69:25]
Matt Taibbi
And one of the subtle little changes that happened to the media business in the last eight years is they stopped doing that. They would tell you.
- [69:34]
Tucker Carlson
That's fascinating.
- [69:35]
Matt Taibbi
Right. They would tell you the thing that happened that day, and they wouldn't tell you all this backstory that, that you needed to know to really understand what you were reading. And so, yeah, I think we're going to have the opportunity now to see these things laid out in full and, you know, in hindsight, and that's hopefully going to be able to persuade people who, who didn't see it the first time.
- [70:03]
Tucker Carlson
That's such a fascinating observation, which I've never heard before or thought of, but.
- [70:07]
Matt Taibbi
Isn'T it, isn't it true?
- [70:08]
Tucker Carlson
So true. It's so true. And so everything's out of context, right? Yeah, there's, there's a certain element of dot connecting required in journalism. Like, why am I telling you this? Why does it matter? How does it connect to things that happen, other things that happened or may.
- [70:22]
Matt Taibbi
Happen, like even simple things, like when, you know, the, if Anthony Fauci comes out and says, well, masks are important because of X, well, you have to put in the timeline of what, what he originally said about that. Yes. Or, you know, Joe Biden saying, you know, we have to correct misinformation because they're killing people. And you got to point out that they were wrong about things themselves or that the Biden administration itself was de. Amplified by, by some of these platforms accidentally. But they were right. But, yeah, they just left out a lot of backstory, and we have to get back into the, the business of telling people the whole story from the beginning.
- [71:12]
Tucker Carlson
Fascinating.
- [71:13]
Matt Taibbi
Yeah.
- [71:15]
Tucker Carlson
Okay, so Russiagate.
- [71:17]
Matt Taibbi
Russiagate. We, I mean, and that's one of the reasons why the, the pardon of Adam Schiff is kind of interesting because he's a central figure of, of both the J6 committee, but, but also the Russiagate story. And, you know, he was somebody who was giving interviews saying that preemptive pardons should never be given, but whatever. Yes, Russiagate is a thing. Then there's the whole question of lawfare. Right. And the effort to make sure that Biden faced no opposition at all in his reelection campaign. And this is here, I'm not just talking about, you know, Donald Trump in the lawsuit to prevent him from being on the ballot because of the 14th amendment. And all that this extends to, even to groups like no Labels or the Green Party or Dean Phillips or Marianne Williamson or Cornel West. There was an extraordinary, calculated effort to prevent competition. Now, yes, that's not necessarily illegal. Parties can do whatever they want internally, but it's still fascinating that there, there had to have been some kind of coordinated campaign if, if there's any communication between the White House, say, and the groups that were suing, you know, no Labels or RFK or, you know, issuing challenges. No Labels went through this extraordinary incident where somebody created a dummy no Labels site, and it had a big picture of Donald Trump on it. So that would try to associate no Labels with Trump. And there's a lawsuit going on about it right now. What was the real origin of that? Like, you know, who, who, who financed that whole thing? I mean, I, I think there are a lot of stories about little, tiny dirty tricks that are, that are going to Be coming.
- [73:25]
Tucker Carlson
Well, and also like the. But the main question was, who makes these decisions? So if the Democratic Party's running the United States, which they have for four years, I think we can say that. What does that mean? Who's running the Democratic Party?
- [73:35]
Matt Taibbi
Right.
- [73:36]
Tucker Carlson
I mean, I would imagine it's a coalition of elected officials, Chuck Schumer, big fundraisers. Right. Jeffrey Katzenberg, and, I don't know, Obama, I guess. But who really is running this? Who's on the central committee?
- [73:56]
Matt Taibbi
Right. And how is that done? How was the coordination managed with these sort of legal action committees that were mass filing suits about everything from, you know, the, the ballot access issue to. There were clan act suits that were filed against people. I mean, did that have any connection to people who are actually in office? If it did, you know, then we have another corruption situation involved. But yeah, the larger question of who. Who was managing all this stuff, because it clearly wasn't Joe Biden. That's right.
- [74:34]
Tucker Carlson
Who runs the country?
- [74:35]
Matt Taibbi
Who. Who runs the country? That's.
- [74:36]
Tucker Carlson
Don't. In a democracy, we have a right to know.
- [74:39]
Matt Taibbi
Right. That, you know, our mutual friend Walter Kern talked about this, saying that this was the first time that we had a president were that had a sign on his desk basically that said, the buck does not stop here.
- [74:53]
Tucker Carlson
No.
- [74:53]
Matt Taibbi
Right. We don't know where the buck stopped during this period. And so that, That's a fascinating question, but the whole, you know, war gaming of, of the last election season, there are a lot of stories people don't even remember this. Like New Hampshire held a primary, right? People went and they voted in the New Hampshire primary, and then the results were canceled and they held a second nominating event on a Saturday night months later where a bunch of officials got together and they just decided to allocate the. The delegates themselves. Like, I'd never heard of that before, just canceling an election and just sort of redoing it in a, in a closed meeting, like, how does that happen?
- [75:39]
Tucker Carlson
And just turning the spoils over to somebody else.
- [75:43]
Matt Taibbi
I think it ended up mostly having the same result, but for some reason they held the second contest. It's just very strange why that happened. So that we got to get into. Then there's the whole question of the investigation of the Trump assassination incidents. We heard nothing about that. It was the most extraordinary news story that I've ever. I mean, apart from the disappearing president and the mysterious nomination and Covid.
- [76:21]
Tucker Carlson
You.
- [76:21]
Matt Taibbi
Know, presidential candidate and ex president gets shot and the story's dead within like 48 hours. And all you Read in the news from the FBI, there are these comments saying that they don't have any motive, evidence. We've done a hundred interviews, but we don't know anything about why this happened or, you know, what was going on there. Do you believe that? I have a very hard time believing that. There's nothing interesting.
- [76:49]
Tucker Carlson
He was kind of your classic 20 year old American kid with no social media presence whatsoever ever.
- [76:57]
Matt Taibbi
Right.
- [76:58]
Tucker Carlson
It is a very typical American story where one day you just wake up and decide to die assassinating a presidential candidate for no reason.
- [77:06]
Matt Taibbi
Right. It's like who has like your first joint. Yeah, your first joint.
- [77:12]
Tucker Carlson
Yeah.
- [77:15]
Matt Taibbi
And then this, the second one, I mean, you know, the, the Ryan Routh thing that like, that's not weird at all. Like I just flew into Florida last night. I don't think I could have gotten, gotten my hands on, you know, a Chinese made SKS semiautomatic rifle without help. I mean, I don't know that's being a little conspiratorial, but look, there are.
- [77:38]
Tucker Carlson
A lot with members of Congress. He was lived in Ukraine. What. And we know that our intel agencies, working through the Ukrainian intel agencies have murdered all these people and tried to murder all these people, including some I know personally. And so that's a, like, that's just a fact. And he, he was there with them, but this had nothing to do. And by the way, are those the only two attempts on Donald Trump's life, do you think, during this campaign season? I don't think so.
- [78:06]
Matt Taibbi
So I don't.
- [78:06]
Tucker Carlson
Why don't we know more about that?
- [78:08]
Matt Taibbi
I don't know why we don't know more about that.
- [78:10]
Tucker Carlson
Right. So, and I, I mean I've, you know, talked to the Trump people and Trump himself and I, I, I'm being sincere. I really don't have a sense of what they think of all of that. I know that in public they haven't been anxious to talk about it at all.
- [78:25]
Matt Taibbi
So I've talked to some of them and you know, I've heard a lot of anger about this that, you know, and I think this is, this is the impetus for these investigations. I think the, probably the second attempt was the last straw for some of the people on his staff. And, and you know, it's part of the reason why I think they're gonna be very public about this.
- [78:56]
Tucker Carlson
It can't come too soon. I really think, and I will say whatever people watching think of Trump, I know for a dead certain fact that a lot of the people who work for him really like him personally. So I think they are mad about it.
- [79:08]
Matt Taibbi
They're very mad about it. And then, sorry, just to finish off the censorship thing, that is gonna be a major investigation. There's at least two that I know of that are already underway. You know, the government affair, the, you know, Rand Paul's committee, the Government Oversight Committee in, in the Senate. They, they really want to do a big thing like a government files type of thing where it would be like the Twitter files, but for the whole federal government, basically. And I, I think there are so many different wings of the government that were involved in what we got to see in the Twitter files. Which, you know, to follow the, the example of what I just said, I have to repeat what this is. You know, when Elon Musk bought Twitter, he opened up Twitter, Twitter's internal correspondence. And we got to see that there was this big bureaucracy with government pressuring platforms like Twitter and Facebook to censor content. But we only got to see a little bit of it. And I think what's going to come out is, you know, how extensive it really was, what agencies were really involved in it, you know, how many people were, were committed to that effort. What also were we negotiating with the European Union to be part of the Digital Services Act? Was the State Department doing that? You know, I think so. There's going to be a big followed it.
- [80:48]
Tucker Carlson
Can you just describe the Digital Services Act?
- [80:51]
Matt Taibbi
The Digital Services act is like the, it's like the wet dream of every sensor in the world, right? Basically it mandates that every Internet platform abide by the recommendations of these people called trusted flaggers, who are basically licensed content reviewers who look on things on social media. And if they see a narrative that they don't like, they will elevate it to the platform. If the platform does not abide by the recommendations, they get crippling, enormous fines. And this is one of the reasons why there was a dispute between Elon Musk and Europe about whether or not he was following these rules closely. Closely enough. This just came into effect last year. But it's, it's an extremely effective way to, to regulate speech because it doesn't require the government to actually do it. It's the private platform that actually commits, of course, the censorship. And this third party methodology, which is specifically, by the way, what, what Donald Trump referenced in his free speech Executive order, we don't want that to happen. We're going to not allow that. They already have the full blown Death Star version in Europe of that. Right. And so the investigation here in the United States is going to basically uncover how far along were we into developing the same kind of thing The Twitter file suggested that we're already doing it informally and illegally, probably, but we want to find out. Exactly.
- [82:36]
Tucker Carlson
With Snopes and all the other fact checkers.
- [82:39]
Matt Taibbi
Yes, all the fact checking organizations. Right. You know, sometimes that was done informally by inference or it was done through NGOs that made recommendations. But. But I think the really dangerous stuff is when you had State Department agencies like the Global Engagement center or the FBI's Foreign Influence Task Force making direct recommendations to these platforms, or the White House, in your case. We're going to find out all these communications, not just little pieces of them.
- [83:11]
Tucker Carlson
What about the US Government? The Intel Agency's control of Wikipedia, which basically is our collective memory at this point. It's elevated by Google. It's the top of every search. It is the only history most people will ever read. And it's controlled by the US Government to disappear inconvenient facts.
- [83:32]
Matt Taibbi
Yeah, I mean, Wikipedia has a very advanced system for regulating what gets into Wikipedia pages. If it's not a certain kind of source, it doesn't get on there. There was a bizarre incident last year where the real clear politics, you know, polling average, which is a tool that reporters have been using for almost two decades, they kind of left it off their, their page of polling average sites because they didn't like the page, I guess. I don't know. But yeah, I think we have to get some clarity about what happened there. Obviously, the former head of Wikipedia is now in a. Or a senior position in npr. The deputy or the CEO.
- [84:24]
Tucker Carlson
One government media job to another.
- [84:26]
Matt Taibbi
Yeah, exactly. And the COO of NPR is the former head of this thing called the Aspen Commission on Information Disorder, which is one of the groups that we investigated in the Twitter files. It was sort of heavily into this whole content moderation question. So the merging of state media with platforms and regulation of sourcing and all that stuff, that's probably going to come out too.
- [84:52]
Tucker Carlson
Kind of weird that the head of the Aspen Institute wrote the biography of Elon Musk, isn't it?
- [84:56]
Matt Taibbi
Right, yeah, exactly. Yeah. The Walter Pincus, right?
- [85:00]
Tucker Carlson
Isaacson, Isaac. Walter Pincus was the CIA reporter at the Washington.
- [85:04]
Matt Taibbi
Can you cut that? I'm sorry.
- [85:05]
Tucker Carlson
No, no, no. It's just funny.
- [85:07]
Matt Taibbi
Yeah.
- [85:07]
Tucker Carlson
You remember Walter Pincus.
- [85:08]
Matt Taibbi
Yeah, Walter Isaacson. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it is weird. The Aspen Institute. I mean, they played a very strange role in the whole censorship story. But. But yeah.
- [85:32]
Tucker Carlson
So what happens to the. You said the, the media as constituted is dead. But I mean, like, the Episcopal Church, like, they have enormous, like, shells left. You know what I mean? Like, the church has died, but the. They've got great churches, great buildings. What do you. What happens to, like, the Washington Post and NBC News that still has bureaus and CNN and, like, what. What happens to these things?
- [85:59]
Matt Taibbi
They're going to struggle, I think, to get audience back. You already see that the strategy of some of them is to try to pander to the audiences that they betrayed previously. Yeah, there was a funny episode over last weekend where NBC and Saturday Night Live, you know, they finally did a joke picking on Rachel Maddow. It wasn't particularly funny, but it was a signal that, okay, we're going to suck up to this group now. Right. As opposed to the other one, which is so loathsome that.
- [86:35]
Tucker Carlson
But Rachel Maddow is not the core. Whatever you think of Rachel Maddow, she just, like, advertises herself as Rachel Maddow. You know, one person's opinions.
- [86:45]
Matt Taibbi
That's funny. You sounded like her for a second there.
- [86:47]
Tucker Carlson
Yeah, well, I know her and I. I've never been mad at her. I couldn't disagree more. I know. I'm sure she's attacked me a lot. I wouldn't know. But I'm not mad at Rachel Maddow.
- [86:55]
Matt Taibbi
I'm.
- [86:55]
Tucker Carlson
I'm mad at Kelanian. And like.
- [86:57]
Matt Taibbi
No, of course.
- [86:58]
Tucker Carlson
You know what I mean? People who pose as reporters who are actually just mouthpieces for the intel world.
- [87:03]
Matt Taibbi
Of course. And my only point is that just by, you know, changing their. The direction of their bs, they're not going to win back audience. Right. People. You know, and this is something that I, That I've noticed since I've been in the business, people in media continually underestimate audiences. They think that they're much stupider than they really are. I remember when I covered Wall Street, I was constantly told that you. You can't do these big stories on credit default swaps and all these other things because audiences don't want to hear about it. They'll. They'll turn the page, but it's not true. People have a great hunger to find out things, and they have a much stronger ability to understand things than most media people imagine. And so when they do these sort of transparent exercises in lying and PR and political propaganda and they think that people won't notice, it makes it worse. The number is going to go down rather than up when they start.
- [88:12]
Tucker Carlson
Totally.
- [88:12]
Matt Taibbi
Don't you think?
- [88:13]
Tucker Carlson
I mean, well, it's just interesting. I Actually think it's more sinister even than you described. So the two topics, after 30 years in the television, the two topics that they never wanted to do, they always want to do stuff about trannies or race or, you know, whatever, all that stuff, but they never want to do economics or foreign policy ever.
- [88:31]
Matt Taibbi
Right.
- [88:31]
Tucker Carlson
And their view was. Or their. Their stated view was the audience doesn't care. And then I get fired and start doing foreign policy stuff, and it gets crazy numbers. And I only do it purely because I'm interested. That's it. I was always interested. And I'm also interested in economics. Not an expert, but I think it matters. That's. That's why I'm interested. Right. You do a story like that, you blow out of the water all the pap that they do. So it turns out there is a deep reservoir of interest among viewers and readers for these stories. And I'm starting to think that maybe the people who run the networks where I worked, they just didn't want to address that stuff because there was a consensus on it that they agreed with and that they didn't want to challenge.
- [89:12]
Matt Taibbi
Absolutely.
- [89:12]
Tucker Carlson
You think so?
- [89:13]
Matt Taibbi
Oh, 100%. I think that. I think that the. Especially when you're talking about, you know, interventionist military policies, whether or not they've been effective. Yeah. Try. Try pitching stories to, you know, one of the big newspapers about, you know, maybe some kind of downside to an invasion or an occupation or the expansion of, you know, with a thousand military bases in the Middle east or whatever it is, drone warfare, like, you know, you're gonna have a hard time selling that one. Right.
- [89:49]
Tucker Carlson
But they did it in the slyest way. I mean, it went right over my head for decades. They did it not by saying, you know, we just don't agree. You know, we have one perspective on that and we're gonna stick with it. That's a straightforward way to explain it, which I can digest. They instead said, no, the audience just doesn't care, and you're basically putting the business at risk by covering things that people have no interest in. So get back to Natalee Holloway or whatever the drama of the moment was. And I believed that. I believed it. I mean, I just assume people just aren't interested. I guess I internalized the. Our audience's dumb position, which they had for the whole time I worked there.
- [90:24]
Matt Taibbi
Yeah. And it's worse in TV than it is in print, but it shouldn't be. Right. And I got the same thing. I mean, not so much at Rolling Stone, but I remember we did One story where our plan was to do one story on what caused the financial crisis, and we got such an overwhelming response because it wasn't anywhere. People could not read anywhere what happened to the economy in 2008. There was not a rational explanation that people could read. And so.
- [90:57]
Tucker Carlson
Well, you did big. I guess numbers is not applicable to a magazine. But that got. I mean, your stories on that were widely read because you're one of the only people doing it.
- [91:07]
Matt Taibbi
Right. But it wasn't so much what I was doing, it was just. It was just the fact of, you know, how does this work? Who was really profiting by it? What happened to the people who bought these homes, et cetera, et cetera. Just basic questions. And people wanted to know and, and as you discover, they want to know other things. Where are they spending the money that I send every year that goes to the Pentagon? That's right, right. How is. How is the disappear into a black hole and it's not auditable and that's okay.
- [91:38]
Tucker Carlson
And I, you know, it's funny, I remember getting back in the summer, late August of 2001, from Maine. I'd been in Maine and, you know, on. Just on vacation, going back to work. And our. I was at CNN then, and we were wall to wall, literally wall to wall on a story about a congressman from Bakersfield, California, Kern county, called Gary Condit. And the question was, did he murder his intern Chandra Levy? And then later, whatever, in case anyone cares, turns out she was killed by an illegal alien from El Salvador called Ingamar Gwendeke. He killed a couple other people, I think, anyway, whatever. That was the story. But at the time, we were fully immersed in this question of is this moderate Democrat from Bakersfield a murderer? And, I mean, we did specials on it. It's all we did. And then that September that was interrupted by 9 11. And I remember thinking at the time, like, 911 came out of nowhere. There was no kind of backstory. It just happened. It was like truly like the least expected thing that ever happened.
- [92:41]
Matt Taibbi
Right.
- [92:42]
Tucker Carlson
In retrospect, I think, were there things going on in the world, bigger trends, that maybe we should, as a news company, we should have been paying attention to sort of prepare people for at least the idea that, like, wow, something bad could happen because there's a lot going on abroad.
- [92:58]
Matt Taibbi
Yeah. I think if you had visited parts of the Middle east back then, you.
- [93:02]
Tucker Carlson
Would, oh, we had the coal bombing and the Saudis, where we had bases in places that were clearly very provocative for no real reason.
- [93:11]
Matt Taibbi
The Kenyan bombing. Yes.
- [93:13]
Tucker Carlson
Exactly. There was a lot going on and we just kind of ignored all of it. But we didn't just ignore it, we ignored it in this manic way, like, must cover Gary Condit. And I'm not a conspiracy nut, Matt, but you do sort of wonder like, what was that?
- [93:28]
Matt Taibbi
Yeah, those were the good old days when, when the, the manias were things like the summer of the shark. Right. Remember that?
- [93:36]
Tucker Carlson
Do I remember? I think I, I think I participated in it. Should you swim? But, but then you get 9 11, like this one, you know, sort of beautiful fall morning and everything changes and it's like, I do think it's fair to ask, even if there's no intent involved, like, how did we, like, what should we have done differently to at least give people the sense that there were highly organized, well funded elements abroad that hated us. Like, I just did not know that and most people didn't.
- [94:05]
Matt Taibbi
Yeah. And why didn't we do that?
- [94:08]
Tucker Carlson
Honestly?
- [94:08]
Matt Taibbi
And it came as a shock to a lot of people, a complete shock.
- [94:12]
Tucker Carlson
Were you in the country when that happened?
- [94:13]
Matt Taibbi
No, I was, I was in Russia and.
- [94:17]
Tucker Carlson
Well, so at least you have that excuse, you know, you're living in another country. I lived in Washington D.C. covering the news for C. I mean I hosted a show on CNN and I had no idea that like, oh, that's a.
- [94:26]
Matt Taibbi
Terrifying feeling, right, to be. You gotta cover something that you have no back background in.
- [94:32]
Tucker Carlson
Well, there was no covering it. There was just watching it.
- [94:34]
Matt Taibbi
Right, yeah, right.
- [94:35]
Tucker Carlson
And there's never actually been any covering of it. No one's ever really covered 9 11. Like what was that? Yeah, exactly.
- [94:42]
Matt Taibbi
And what followed it. Yeah, exactly.
- [94:44]
Tucker Carlson
Yeah, well, I did cover that, but like the 9 11, like how do, how exactly did that happen? We have all these law enforcement and intelligence agencies protecting us and they had no idea that there are, you know, dozens and dozens and dozens of, you know, the 19 hijackers, but then all the support people living in our country, training, getting money from. So we never really. Like what. Anyway, I don't know why I'm going off on that, but it's like no one ever asked the basic questions.
- [95:13]
Matt Taibbi
Right, right. And you know, there are a lot of people who didn't ask basic questions in the last eight years, including me.
- [95:24]
Tucker Carlson
I guess, because a lot of the things you just said are like, yeah, whatever happened to that?
- [95:29]
Matt Taibbi
Well, there's, it becomes overwhelming after a while. Right. I mean, you know, the 50th time they tell you that democracy is going to end in 10 minutes or you're going to die. If you don't take this medicine or whatever it is or, you know, your kids are going to die, it. Emotionally, it wears on people and it becomes very difficult. I mean, I think this was a factor in, it was a factor in a lot of the corruption stories because the audiences were not, were they were not going to be receptive to alternative versions of what they had just heard because it was such an emotionally wrenching experience for them. So it's going to take a while for people to digest a lot of these things. You know, I think it's happening slowly, but, but what's going to be interesting about this period is that there's going to be this avalanche of primary material that's going to, that's going to come out. And I'm fast. I can't wait.
- [96:29]
Tucker Carlson
You're going to need to hire more staff to keep up with it all.
- [96:32]
Matt Taibbi
Yeah, absolutely. Probably. Probably that's the case. And it's going to be a fun time for journalists like me, but just as a citizen, I can't wait to read it, you know.
- [96:42]
Tucker Carlson
So can I ask one last question of your, Your reporting is marked by its command of detail, I would say. I mean, it is. I read it.
- [96:49]
Matt Taibbi
So.
- [96:50]
Tucker Carlson
Yeah, no, but of like, a lot of detail. Like a lot of detail. And so you look at things. I, I kind of like, you know, I'm not a detail guy. You are. What? Name one, like, tiny detail that you are personally obsessed with and maybe mildly embarrassing, embarrassed to admit you're obsessed with, but, like, what's the one thing that you just, just you want to know, like, you. That you've been wondering about?
- [97:15]
Matt Taibbi
I, I mean, I, I think the thing that happened last year with that frenzied week in July.
- [97:23]
Tucker Carlson
Yeah.
- [97:23]
Matt Taibbi
With, with Biden and, you know, and, and the, the lying about the poll numbers and the, the phony, the clearly planted stories about Nancy Pelosi.
- [97:38]
Tucker Carlson
The poll numbers. What part?
- [97:40]
Matt Taibbi
Well, look, there were stories that Biden was ahead in the polls that, that came out as they were telling us that he had to drop out because the poll numbers were so dire. NPR did a story like, virtually, I believe it was this a couple of days after the debate. I'll have to go back and look at this. But there, but, yeah, there were stories that he was doing fine in the polls. And of course, we later found out from Biden staffers that they said they never had. I'm sorry, that that was about Kamala. They never had internal polling showing Kamala ahead.
- [98:15]
Tucker Carlson
Yes.
- [98:16]
Matt Taibbi
Even though there were scads of stories telling us the opposite, which is. But for me, the, the, the story that I just can't get past is what happened in that one week. Yes. And, and how did they, how did they manufacture that whole thing without anybody showing any kind of curiosity about it? You know, had the media been so completely paper trained by that moment that they. I. I guess so. Right. But you know, it's the same, but.
- [98:48]
Tucker Carlson
It'S the same impulse that maintains discipline in Washington and in the media, which is commitment to party first. And what, what is. So that is the one thing, like all the things I disagree with the Democratic Party and some in the Republican Party on policy. Like, I have all kinds of disagreements. Like, I think that they think this. Okay, got it. But the one thing I really can't relate to is the loyalty to party. What is that?
- [99:13]
Matt Taibbi
I never understood that. You know, like what, you're going to agree with a bunch of people on everything that they do and you're going to support that. It's one thing for politicians to act that way, but I cannot understand it in a media person.
- [99:28]
Tucker Carlson
Do you think that's a defining fact of like our life is this commitment to party?
- [99:33]
Matt Taibbi
Well, right now we have the situation where the only versions of things that you get are essentially party explanations. And that's why it's so interesting that there's this sort of intermediate podcast space where people are exploring things from all different directions and that's where all the people are going. I don't think it's a coincidence. Incidents can that last? I think it can. I think what's going to happen is you're going to have new institutions that are built up around that, that are, that are just going to find new ways to.
- [100:07]
Tucker Carlson
Then you can't have. As long as that lasts. You can't have authoritarian rule.
- [100:10]
Matt Taibbi
Right. Oh, yeah, and that was proven. I mean, look, the handful of podcasts that a lot of people chuckled about but had a huge impact in the, in the last election. And you know what? Shame on those media people who laugh at those podcasts because among other things, they had lower numbers than a lot of those podcasts. Like significantly lower.
- [100:34]
Tucker Carlson
Yeah, right.
- [100:35]
Matt Taibbi
And you know, they're snobs about it. They say, oh, well, that's, you know, we, we have a better quality of audience. No, you, you, you just are not convincing.
- [100:44]
Tucker Carlson
That's actually have a much lower quality of audience. You know, your average Rogan listener is way smarter than your average cable news viewer. Like, sorry, right.
- [100:56]
Matt Taibbi
Yeah. And they're more willing and partly because they Watch shows like Joe Rogan, which, which ask them to entertain multiple points of view on things. Right? That's kind of the whole idea. You'll see somebody. There are lots of people who go on the Rogan show that I disagree with.
- [101:12]
Tucker Carlson
Me too.
- [101:12]
Matt Taibbi
But I hear it, you know, and that's the whole point, right? Is you get to hear different points of view. And that's been excluded from this other form of media, this kind of bifurcated red, blue landscape which doesn't work anymore and is in collapse. But I, I just think that this, this period now, it's going to be great for launching the, this new media that's necessary because they're going to have all this material to work with and because it's going to be all documents, people are going to trust it, right? In the same way that they trusted the Twitter files. I didn't have anything to say about it. I just sort of put it out there. But all these new, these independent organs are going to look at this, these reams of material and they're going to discuss it and pass it around. And that's going to be how the public is educated, which is great. I love it. It's the best, right?
- [102:12]
Tucker Carlson
Man, you put me in such a better mood. Matt Taibbi, thank you. No, thank you. Seriously. I mean, I think you would do this for free. I get that feeling.
- [102:21]
Matt Taibbi
Absolutely would.
- [102:22]
Tucker Carlson
I love it.
- [102:23]
Matt Taibbi
Thanks, Tucker.
- [102:23]
Tucker Carlson
Thank you.
- [102:24]
Matt Taibbi
Appreciate it.
- [102:26]
Tucker Carlson
Thanks for listening to the Tucker Carlson Show. If you enjoyed it, you can go to tuckercarlson.com to see everything that we have made. The complete library. Tuckercarlson.com.