Matt Taibbi: How Intel Agencies Control the Media, Putin’s Rise to Power, and 2024 Predictions

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Taibi's Italian.

It's Italian by way of Lebanese.

It's like Sicilian.

It's Arabs in Sicily.

Yes.

Yeah, but I'm neither.

My father's Filipino.

My mother's Irish.

He was adopted.

Oh, my dad was adopted too.

Really?

Yeah.

Oh, wow.

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.

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Here's the episode.

Okay, so here's my question.

You're a reporter.

You've been a reporter your entire life.

Your dad was a reporter, well-known reporter.

So you grew up in journalism.

Journalism is now justly, I would say, the most hated profession.

The Sackler family is more popular than NBC News at this point.

Right.

And Congress is more popular.

Congress is literally.

People are like, you know, maybe a child molester can be fixed.

We don't need to execute them, but NBC News, okay?

So, but

so that's bewildering, I'm sure, for you.

But for those of us who having trouble remembering what the media landscape looked like in like 1990 when you were finishing college, what were your assumptions about journalism?

What did you think you were getting into when you started?

So I grew up around my dad's work.

He was a TV reporter in kind of the heyday of local affiliate news, like as portrayed in Anchorman,

the bad facial hair, all that stuff.

So I used to hang around the newsroom all the time.

And my father is sort of a reporter's reporter.

He's very gifted at striking up conversations with people.

He's really good at that aspect of the job, which is,

I would say, probably the most important thing, which is being able to talk to people and get everybody's perspective.

He would be able to go to,

you know, any scene of fire or murder or whatever, instantaneously get people talking to him and trusting him.

And

where does that skill come from?

I think you just got to have to be born with it.

Yeah, there's a certain like sort of gregariousness, right, that some people have.

He likes people.

Yeah, he likes people.

He's, he, he's able to, you know, sort of strike up conversations quickly.

And I was very shy growing up.

So the first thing I concluded was, I'm never going to be able to do that.

Right.

So this is, you know, this is like a superpower that he has that I don't.

And I thought I would have to go in a different direction.

I also grew up wanting to be a fiction writer.

Right.

And I was really obsessed with that growing up.

And then when I got out of college, I realized that the only thing I really knew how to do was his job

because I had watched it so much growing up.

And so it was something that would keep me at least tangentially in the writing business.

So I got into it.

And only over time did I really appreciate

the way they did reporting back then.

It was a much different thing than what people did.

Did you think it was honorable?

Like when you were a kid, did you think like my dad does something embarrassing or my dad does something important and useful?

No, I thought what he did was important, useful, and

honest.

And, you know, there was something very egalitarian about the way reporters carried themselves once upon a time.

They, you know,

only now are journalists, you know, universally called

from the Ivy Leagues and these upper class schools.

In fact, you know, I was part of that generation of sort of rich kids who went into journalism.

When my father went into it, he started when he was 18.

Journalism was more of a trade than a profession.

It wasn't necessary to have a college education.

And most of the people who went into it, they had kind of a natural

antipathy for people in power.

They

overwhelmingly sided with the ordinary person just reflexively.

And they were, you know, they told the news from that perspective very often, right?

And it was the classic

editorialist at the time was somebody like, you know, Jimmy Breslin or Mike Royko, this sort of voice of the people kind of a thing and so i grew up always imagining that the reporter was somebody who was on the side of ordinary people uh and that because i was one right yeah exactly and you know my father carried it that way for sure and uh so i did your father never go to college No, he did.

He went to Rutgers.

He had me while he was at Rutgers.

That's why he had to go into reporting.

He worked at the home news

in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

And then, you know,

as soon as he graduated, he went into TV.

But no, I always had this vision of journalism as this thing that

it wasn't for intellectuals.

It wasn't for

people who had graduate degrees.

It was for people who hustled, who worked hard and had.

you know, kind of a common touch, right?

Like that's kind of the key to the job is being willing to listen to people and all that.

So I had a very specific idea of what journalism was when I went into it.

I just thought I wasn't going to be particularly good at it because

of that, you know,

deficit, right?

Like I didn't have that gift that he had.

But I started overseas in Russia.

And because I was able to, I spoke Russian already early, I had an advantage over other American reporters at the time.

What year did you go to Russia?

So I studied in 89 and 90 when it was still Soviet.

You know, I took a year and a half abroad and then went back as soon as I graduated.

Actually, I went back before I graduated and started stringing and working for

a bunch of different organizations there and finally got a job at an expat paper.

So 91-ish?

Yeah, 91-ish, 92.

Right after the revolution, basically.

Which was 91, August.

Yeah.

Summer.

August, 91.

Yeah.

So shortly after that.

What was it like?

It was amazing.

It was the Wild West.

The funny thing for me is if people ask me why did I love Russia so much, I mean, the first reason was that all my favorite writers growing up are Russians.

And

Nikolai Gogol was my hero.

I wanted to be a comic novelist.

And the Russians have so many amazingly funny writers, as you know, right?

From Bulgakov to, you know, to Dovlatov, all these people.

I wanted to learn the language.

language.

Then, when I got there, I had been a very depressed teenager, had struggled socially, behaviorally, all these other things.

I got to late Soviet Russia, and everybody's depressed.

And, you know, nobody's happy.

And I thought, this is amazing.

I fit right in.

And

you had a dark Slavic soul and you didn't even know it.

Yeah, exactly.

And, you know, in America, there's this incredible pressure on young people.

You have to succeed right away, right?

Be cheerful.

Yeah, be cheerful, look good, be in shape, like all these other things.

Russians, no way, there was none of that attitude.

Nobody was going anywhere.

And

when I got there, that was just incredibly attractive to me.

And

so, you know,

I've never heard that take before.

That is awesome.

No, it was really funny.

And because of that,

I got along with

Russians in a way probably that other Americans didn't.

You know, I think

there was a connection there that was that was very natural and um i really took to the place early how did you speak the language well i mean it's like any anybody who like you come to the united states if you have no choice and you have to speak english you you'll learn it pretty quickly um

so uh i studied in sain petersburg but then i briefly went to uzbekistan uh

because I had this idea that there weren't that many stringers in Uzbekistan.

So I would get more work.

But those who don't know it, I don't know that there are stringers anymore.

What's a stringer?

So a stringer is like a person who is not on staff for a newspaper, but just sort of sits in a place and waits for something to happen.

And then, you know, like the New York Times or the AP will call them and say, hey, can you, can you chase down that, you know, thing that happened?

In my case, an earthquake.

that happened in Kyrgyzstan gave me an early chance to write a couple of stories.

Right.

And who'd you write them for?

I think I wrote wrote one for AP in 1991.

I ended up getting thrown out of Uzbekistan because I had a bad visa.

But while I was there,

I really learned Russian because nobody there spoke English.

And I also was on the Uzbek national baseball team, which was hilarious.

How?

So one day I was walking past one of the colleges and I saw people playing baseball.

And I was going to keep walking.

And then I thought, I'm in Uzbekistan.

what what is that uh it turned out that uh there was i think it was like a refrigeration school and there were a whole bunch of students from cuba and you know those guys could really play right um so i just went and asked um you guys mind if i play with you and uh so i ended up being a catcher on a team full of Cubans with a Russian coach.

And we played other Central Asian countries.

And it was hilarious.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We had we had ground rules.

This is going to sound like a fake story, but it's true.

We had ground rules when we played in a pasture.

If you hit a sheep, it was a double.

Sorry, if you hit a cow, it was a double.

If you hit a sheep, it was a triple.

That is a true story.

Did anyone ever hit a cow or sheep?

No, no, no.

We only played like two games in that place.

But that actually happened.

I was actually playing baseball

when I got thrown out of the country.

So Uzbekistan in 1991 was not a first world place.

No, Uzbekistan was, you know, it's kind of a typical

Soviet satellite country.

It was really struggling economically.

It had all kinds of problems, you know,

environmentally.

You know, it used to be the big cotton producer for the Soviet Union.

And then, you know,

that sort of dried up for a variety of reasons.

The Siavazov is now gone.

Right.

So

it was a troubled place.

There was a war going on in in Tajikistan right next to us.

And so it was an interesting place to be.

But, you know, it was sort of my first experience.

What did your parents think?

My mother was terrified.

When I got thrown out of the country, I got a visit by

these people who were, I guess their word for it was the SNB, the

Slujba Nazionalnia Bislapasnisti, which is just

their version of the KGB.

And they asked me for my papers.

I had the wrong papers.

I was there in a student visa that I'd kind of,

you know, was kind of phony.

And, but I had to send a telegram

telling my parents that I'd been kicked out of the country.

So I wrote, KGB kicking me out will call from Moscow.

But she got KGB kicking me gut.

We'll call when I get to Moscow.

Beaten to death by the KGB.

So

she was worried.

but um

but no it was fine but your dad was for it yeah i think he he he thought the whole you know adventure thing was interesting and then when he finally visited russia in the mid 90s um you know and saw what the place was like at the time he thought it was you know a paradise for journalists which it was because there was so much crazy stuff going on um

And

it was a great place to learn the profession, really.

Yeah.

What was press freedom like then?

It was really interesting.

There was a very vibrant community of

really hardcore, great investigative reporters who suddenly appeared out of nowhere.

Because remember, the press had been suppressed almost completely for 80, 80 years, right?

And after, as soon as there was a, you know, a little bit of an opening to do real reporting, there were suddenly these very brave reporters who showed up.

And, you know, they were risking their lives every time they wrote because the way the system was set up was that every newspaper was basically owned by a different gangster.

And

you would get material, they called it selling genes over there, right?

So somebody would get give you

a packet of information.

You would write it up about the rival.

gangline figure or politician.

And then, but if they wanted you to pay the price, you you might get shot in a doorway or something like that.

So there were people who got killed by exploding briefcases.

For instance, there was a guy named Dima Kolodov, who worked for Moscow Sikhomsomolots when I was there, who had written about Yeltsin's defense minister.

He got blown up in a train station.

But, you know, the Russians,

those guys were my heroes.

I tagged on.

to a bunch of those people really early.

And that's where I kind of really learned the whole investigative journalism thing was from those people.

You know, not all of whom stayed in the business for very long, sometimes not voluntarily.

You stayed 10 years.

Yes.

Yeah.

How come?

I mean, I love the place.

I was planning on staying forever, really.

You know, then

things definitely turned weird

when the transformation from Yeltsin to Putin happened.

Yes.

You know, we all, none of us had any illusions about who Putin was.

Putin was a known quantity.

He was the deputy mayor of St.

Petersburg when I was a student in St.

Petersburg.

He was kind of known as,

well, I mean,

there were all sorts of stories that were told about him back then.

And when he first came to

power in Moscow, it was sort of widely understood that he was doing it.

And Yeltsin even writes about this in his biography

because Yeltsin needed help getting out of the country and escaping prosecution.

And

there had been some indication that Putin had done that for his previous boss, the mayor of St.

Petersburg, Anatoly Sabchak.

So, you know, the sort of investigator journalism community was very suspicious of Putin when he first arrived.

But the Western journalism community loved him.

And this was Putin.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And this was, you know, I had already become disillusioned with American journalism before that for because they had misreported a lot of things about post-communist Russia.

But that was kind of the last straw for me, I think.

Traditionally, think tanks do a lot of thinking, and the Heritage Foundation still does that, but it also, thankfully, has begun doing.

Heritage has built a massive investigative and litigation operation out of its headquarters to save this country from the corruption that is taking it over, both actual literal corruption, financial corruption, there's a lot of that, but also ideological and moral corruption.

And to fight back, Heritage is engaging in almost 50 separate lawsuits against various government entities to try and pry out information to bring a little sunlight to the process that even Congress can't get.

And it's been working.

They produced documents exposing the Biden crime family to the rest of the world.

You've read those stories.

and helped kill the sweetheart deal that Biden's DOJ tried to make with his son, Hunter Biden.

Heritage has also developed a comprehensive plan to dismantle the deep state, the swamp, by staffing the next administration with people who know what they're doing.

Thousands of Americans who on day one can start to make this country better.

So it's important work.

Again, it's not just thinking, it's doing.

And if you want to support it, go to heritage.org slash tucker.

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Can you just back up one click?

What did they misreport?

So

they would send somebody out to some provincial town like Samara with a,

with an assignment,

find the thriving,

emerging middle class, right?

And so you'd go out to a place where there's like a barter economy, right?

And people are doing subsistence farming, you know, and they would, they would ask around around until they found somebody who had, you know, a VCR or who had been on a vacation to a pizza once or something like that.

And then they would do a whole story like, you know, transition to capitalism, you know, flourishing.

You know, the emerging middle class is, you know, everything's happening right on schedule.

And meanwhile, the country was really...

in the Yeltsin years, was really doing very badly, right?

In contrast to now,

Russia was experiencing sort of record levels of early deaths and

all kinds of horrific things that they weren't telling people back home.

And so

because the

expat community, and you know, I don't really know exactly how this works, but there was a monoculture about the reporting there that is very similar to what it's like now in America.

But there it was sort of cartoonized.

It's a very small community.

Everybody knew knew everybody else.

And, you know, whatever the Washington Post and the New York Times wrote about,

pretty much everybody else followed their lead.

There was almost nobody among the reporters who even spoke Russian, right?

That was totally hazardous.

How can you cover a country if you don't speak the language?

Because that was the tradition.

I mean, if you people would come in, they would cycle in there for a few years.

They would work with translators.

They stayed in a little compound on Kutuzewski Prospekt, which is right near the center of the city.

In the Soviet days, it was sort of walled off by design, but they continued living there for some reason that I didn't really understand.

And with a couple of exceptions, I can think there was a Boston Globe reporter who was fantastic, right, while I was there.

But for the most part,

people came in and they just treated it as a, you know, as a third world backwater.

It's like, you know, if you read The Quiet American, right?

It was that attitude toward.

But I don't understand.

So if you don't speak a language, I mean, I've lived here for 55 years.

I speak English as a native speaker, barely understand the country.

It's just too complicated.

Right.

But if you can't speak the language, you just don't understand it at all.

You have no hope of understanding it, do you?

That's what I thought.

Right.

And this was not just the journalists, but also the diplomats there.

But, you know, this- The diplomats didn't speak Russian.

The diplomats didn't speak Russian.

You're, you know, we have

the ambassador to, to, to Russia, Michael McFaul.

He couldn't, he could barely do, put a sentence together in Russian.

So it was.

What is that?

That just seems like a baseline requirement.

So the, the way it was explained to to us was that this, this was something that was a hangover from

the American diplomatic experience in China before the Maoist revolution, where the diplomats were deemed to have been too close to the local population, didn't warn the people back home what was happening.

So

they made a habit out of cycling people from spot to spot so that they wouldn't become too accustomed to the culture or too acculturated, right?

Which I can maybe see the rationale for a diplomat, maybe, but for a journalist, it makes no sense at all, right?

So to not to not understand

the place that you're reporting on.

So by then,

I.

It doesn't, it doesn't make sense to not understand the place you're reporting on.

That I think, I think we can agree on that.

Right.

Yeah.

But so, so it was, it was a, a strange activity that a lot of them were involved in, where they, they, it mostly interviewed the English-speaking officials in the Yeltsin government, right?

A lot of them had gone to Harvard, um, and they were getting one very specific version of what Russia was going through, what its challenges were.

And at the time, by then, I had already branched off.

I had left

the expat paper of the Moscow Times.

I started up my own newspaper, which was like a nightlife guide.

And I started doing this thing in opposition to that, which was I would go around the country getting jobs in weird places.

Like I

worked as a bricklayer in Siberia.

Really?

Yeah.

did um i i worked at a monastery in mordovia what did you do in the monastery at At construction, you know.

So, well, we just tour the country and kind of find out exactly how people were doing, what the situation was like.

And it was an amazing discovery because every place I went, I learned about a new lie that was being told, you know, to people back home.

And it was deeply disillusioning for me.

I mean, I know.

you've had experiences like this in journalism too, right?

Where you find out that something you thought is totally wrong.

And

that was a real eye-opener for me.

Like completely wrong.

Completely wrong.

Yeah, exactly.

And moreover, that was proven relatively quickly, right?

There was a massive financial collapse in 98, and then Putin came in.

And there was a huge popular repudiation of

the American-style

version of managed democracy that existed under Yeltsin.

And that was real.

I mean, Putin, for all of his

problems, and I was a real critic of Putin's when I was there,

there was no question that he was much more popular than Yeltsin.

The country was very embarrassed by Yeltsin because he was publicly drunk all the time.

He was dysfunctional.

I mean, I think we're living through some of those emotions nowadays.

Yes, we are.

That's right.

It's shameful.

Yeah.

And so they wanted to,

you know, their word was a silny ruka, right?

They wanted a strong hand who would come in and kind of set things right and compete with the Americans.

And they didn't, they didn't like being thought of as a vassal state to the West.

This is an ancient conflict for Russia and America.

This goes back to the days of Peter the Great.

You know, the Slavophiles versus

the Western, you know, the pro-Western crew.

And it, it, the pendulum swung the other way while I was there, you know, and that was, you know, fascinating to watch, but it had some pretty serious consequences too.

Well, yeah, that turned out to be right.

Yeah.

So, but

as for journalism, like you, you began to become disillusioned with the American version in the 90s.

Yes.

Yeah, absolutely.

While I was in Russia,

I became disillusioned both with the format of it, you know, the kind of neutral third-person

version of reporting where we pretend we're not having a point of view.

I didn't like that.

You know, like, for instance, I would get sent out when I was at the Moscow Times, which was a paper I loved, but they would send me to all these events where funny things would happen.

I would come back and write it up with humor, and they would tell me to take out the humor and write it in some other way that was like more serious.

And I think that's a lie, right?

Like, if you, if you go to a scene that's funny, like for instance, I had to cover this ridiculous press conference where Prince Philip appeared for, I think, the World Wildlife Fund or something like that.

And he's giving a speech to all these Russians about, you know, their backward attitudes about conservation and everything.

And in the middle of his speech, the hotel brings the spread, which includes booze.

And all the reporters get up and leave Prince Philip talking by himself while they just eat all the food and drink all the booze.

And to me, that's the story.

So I went home and I wrote that up and they, you know, they kind of wanted me to do something else.

Like pretend it didn't happen.

Right, exactly.

And I thought, well, this, you know, this isn't right.

You know, I mean, I was just a kid, I didn't really know, but I thought there's something not quite right about this.

To what extent, in retrospect, do you think that Western news organizations were taking their cues from Western businesses or Western governments?

Oh,

I mean, 90%, 95 really absolutely yeah i mean if you go back and look at the coverage of

you know the new york times the washington post you know some other organizations you know the current deputy prime minister of canada christia freeland was sort of a colleague at the time she was part of that whole crew of western journalists there what was she like

Well, they were all doing kind of the same thing.

Like the basic line was that there was a new group of robber-bearing capitalists who had appeared.

And yes, it was messy.

It was a messy transition to capitalism was the word they used for it.

Now, actually, it was just pure gangsterism.

And most of the people who got rich did so through absolutely corrupt privatization schemes where, like, for instance, there was a thing called loans for shares, but the government was literally lending the money to cronies so that they could buy companies like Exxon for pennies on the dollar.

You know, I mean, like Yukos, for instance, was a gigantic oil company worth, you know, as much as any Western oil company would be worth.

They bought it for nothing, basically, for a pittance, because they were pals of the people in government.

So they created an instant billionaire class, and that was completely passed over.

Nobody reported on that.

Then, once these people had money,

they were treated as

sort of legitimate wealth creators and, you know, entrepreneurs.

Yeah, exactly.

They didn't,

they weren't even the robber barons who at least like built railroads.

Oh, exactly.

Exactly.

Right.

You know, like these guys didn't do anything except steal.

You know, they were wealth extractors.

And,

and it was amazing watching the hype of

these figures, the, the whitewashing of Yeltsin's complete misrule, his

brutalizing of domestic journalists, right?

I mean, like the, there was a ton of that going on in the 90s, long before Putin came to office and became infamous.

Yes, there were so many journalists who were killed before Putin came under Yeltsin

under Yeltsin, yeah.

The guy I mentioned.

Only Putin kills journalists.

No, no, no, no, no, no.

This, this started, this started from the very beginning they were doing this.

I mean, that guy I told you about with the exploding briefcase, that was 1994 when that happened.

You know, there were,

there were a lot.

I had a friend, not exactly a friend, somebody I knew well, Alexander Hinstein, who also worked for a newspaper there.

He got thrown in a mental institution in the Yeltsin years.

There were all sorts of reporters shot.

If you go in and

shot, killed, beaten.

You know, I had another friend named Leonid Krutakov,

who was not only fired every time he did an expose, but he would be attacked.

He had somebody come through his window one night, if I remember correctly.

So it was a dangerous profession before Putin came to office.

Now, obviously, it went to a new level once he came in.

And there were people I knew who died, right?

You know, in the years after he became president.

But it wasn't an appreciably different vibe for journalists.

The difference was that

Putin concentrated government authority in a way that had not been done previously.

Before, it was more of like a gangland free-for-all.

Putin came in, he took over the last remaining independent television station and TV.

He had one of the oligarchs arrested, Vladimir Gusinski, and

you know, the

owner of Bank Menetep, Mikhail Khodakovsky, famously famously put in jail you know they were sponsors of media as well so uh but

the only thing that was different is that the government was exerting sort of overt control over over media and they were they were stamping out the individual pockets of opposition So during the Elton years, it was very dangerous.

You just, you did still have some freedom to do really good work.

And that's why those people were amazing.

Like, you know, they were risking everything every time they did a story and they were still doing it.

They just had, they had such balls.

It was, it was incredible to watch.

It's just interesting.

And then the contrast, by the way, with between that and the Americans, right, was just so striking for me.

But why would American journalists be providing cover for Yeltsin or ignoring the downside of Yeltsin?

So some of it was cultural, you know, you come in, you don't speak the language.

It's a temporary assignment.

You're hanging around with a bunch of other Westerners.

And so you you don't see, right?

Like that, that was a very typical thing.

The few reporters who, you know, spoke the language and or, you know, married Russian women, right?

Or were Russian men,

they were better, right?

Because they were at least in tune to what was going on in the country.

But Moscow was still and St.

Petersburg were like a different country compared to what was going on in the rest of Russia.

You know, you could be in Moscow and it would seem like a more or less functional

You go 40 miles outside the city and again, there's subsistence farming, you know, and or there's

whole stretches where there's no government and people are just setting up toll roads.

You know,

they're putting on camera fatigues and creating their own toll booths.

So it's like Beirut.

Yeah, exactly.

And

but if you didn't know, if you didn't go out, you wouldn't see it, you know?

So I think that was, it was a problem of perception for a lot of these folks.

And,

um,

but I thought it was inexcusable because,

you know, as a reporter, your first job is to, is to find out, you know, to check for yourself.

And how were you treated by government there?

So

we had a unique position because we were publishing in Russia.

So unlike all those other reporter, American reporters, I was technically a Russian news organization.

We had a Russian newspaper.

We had a Russian business, right?

So even though we were in English, we were regulated by

the Russian government.

We got visited every now and then by the tax police asking for bribes.

And then

after I left, they eventually shut the paper down.

So,

but they, you know,

they paid attention to us, but it wasn't the same as the way they paid attention to the New York Times and other reporters.

I mean, there were people who were Paul Klebnikov, you remember that name?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So he got shot

while he was there.

And

I don't know that it was a Russian government interest that did that, but they were paying attention to coverage that went out overseas.

They didn't care so much about what I was doing, which was writing for people who are in Russia.

And also, we were writing in English.

So God knows how many Russian officials were even understanding what we were doing.

So,

yeah.

So how did,

well, first of all, why'd you leave?

Well,

it became harder and harder.

The expat community shrank when Putin came to power, which killed our advertiser base.

And

we had a humor newspaper that was sort of loosely based on

like a cross between spy magazine and screw and i i kind of thought that we had you know run the course yeah uh creatively while i was there um and you know i

at some point i just wanted to come home but um

but also it you know it had kind of turned nasty uh

you know some of the people who i knew I like I vaguely knew Anna Polykoska, for instance, who got killed while I was there.

And there was another reporter who was sort of a mentor to me, this guy, Yuri Shikachikin, who became a Duma deputy.

He

died under mysterious circumstances.

Some people said it was a poison telephone.

I mean, who knows, right?

But

it got kind of unpleasant.

And,

you know,

the community was just not as big as it had been

in the 90s.

I mean, Moscow in the late 90s was an incredible scene.

It was like Chicago in the 30s.

It's very difficult to describe what it was actually like.

You know, gangsters everywhere, bodies, you know, all over the place, people being thrown out of windows.

There were terrorist explosions happening all the time.

It was a wild place to be.

And

that story kind of ran its course

while I was there.

the city started to transform into what you saw when you went.

Yeah, the most functional city I've ever been.

Yeah, which is so amazing for me to hear.

She was certainly shocking for me.

So this winter, I'm standing in the kitchen with my dogs and my wife comes in.

She's just come back from a long walk and she has this look on her face, this look of tranquility and joy and peace.

And I said, what have you been doing?

And she said, I was praying.

And I said, where?

She said, on my walk for an hour and a half.

And it turns out she was listening to something I'd never heard of before, which is an app called Hallow.

Hallow, H-A-L-L-O-W, Hallow, like Hallowed.

And a friend of hers gave it to her.

And this set off a training reaction in my family where pretty much everyone in my family started to listen to Hallow every day.

It's a prayer app.

And it's the best way, as you know, to find peace.

And this makes it very easy to set aside the time to deeply pray every single day.

And I'm so impressed by Hallow that I tracked down the number of the CEO and I called him and I said, I want to advertise this on our podcast because it's something that I really believe in.

And I think you do an amazing job.

And it's basically non-denominational Christian.

You don't have to be Catholic or Protestant.

You can be any kind of Christian, but Hallow will help you focus your prayer in a way that'll be very obvious to your husband when you walk into the kitchen.

I can promise you that.

It's an amazing, amazing resource.

They've got like 10,000 audio guided prayers, meditations, Bible studies.

Famously, Mark Wahlberg leads one of them.

It's just really, really good.

You can download it for three months free at hallow.com/slash tucker.

And I strongly recommend that you do that.

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So you missed in the 10 years you were gone the entire span of the Clinton years

in 9-11.

And so I think it's fair to say it was a completely different country in 2002 from what it had been in 1992.

What did you think when you got back?

Well, I mean,

I was shocked when I got back.

And I was thinking thinking about this just the other day because, you know, I think a lot now about kind of America's slide toward autocracy because I had this vision the whole time I was there.

I, you know, watching the Russian government in action was like getting this incredible advanced education into

autocratic methods and how things work, right?

You know, the jailing of political opponents, you know, on trumped up charges or, you know, blackmail and how things are leaked by the intelligence services.

Like that stuff just happens out in the open there, right?

And I always had this image that, well, in America, that doesn't go on.

And then I come home to post-9-11 America and the whole vibe is, well, we have to start throwing all of our democratic guarantees overboard because as I think as Dick Cheney put it, we have to start exploring the dark side

because

the Bill of Rights is inadequate to keep us safe we we need to start doing you know all these things that i that i thought were crazy you know the patriot act the the authorization to use military force right like so so

moving the authority to declare war out of congress to basically to the white house mass surveillance uh you know

Guantanamo Bay, all these things were really shocking to me.

And it was, it was kind

I thought it was also ironic to come back from Russia to this developing situation.

And

so what year did you get back?

2002.

So was it clear to you then where the trajectory was headed?

Well, I thought there would be,

I was really naive in retrospect.

I thought there was, I, I took all of my sort of fellow political liberals seriously when they said they were, you know, ardently opposed to this

secretive revolution, right?

And the spy state and drone warfare and all these other things.

And

when Barack Obama, the constitutional lawyer, came along and there was this belief that

he would usher in a transformative presidency that would undo

this chainy vision, which scared me, you know, which I thought was...

sort of going to undo the schoolhouse rock version of America that I grew up believing in.

And

I believe I believed it.

I'm kind of embarrassed now.

I actually thought that was going to happen that when Barack Obama got elected, that all that would

turn back.

But in hindsight,

they never had any intention, it seems,

of changing anything.

If you go back and look at the statements,

they were saying things like, well, we're not, we're not, we might not change the status quo right away.

Right.

And

I had,

you know, I had been very positive about Barack Obama.

I covered him on the campaign trail.

Because

my job, by the way, when I came back, I lucked into getting the greatest job in journalism, which is covering campaigns for Rolling Stone.

Right.

And

I was very impressed by Barack Obama.

I thought he was incredible.

But it was disillusioning to see what happened afterwards.

At what point did you realize he wasn't what you thought he was?

So right after he got elected, I got assigned to cover the causes of the financial crisis, and which was funny because I had no background in finance.

I didn't have any clue what a mortgage-backed security was or how any of that works.

But one of the first things that happened was that,

you know, I got calls from people in the Democratic Party who said, you should look at the president's relationship to Citigroup

and

you know, how the Citigroup bailout happened.

You know, he put a Citigroup executive who had been a college buddy of his in charge of his economic transition during which they gave a very, you know, sweetheart bailout deal to

Citigroup.

And this was an early indication that, you know, this president was maybe not exactly what I thought he was.

Not transformative in the way you imagined.

Right.

Yeah, exactly.

And, and

even though Rolling Stone couldn't, they were over the moon about Obama, right?

That was true true love i remember that right yeah that was almost erotic yeah oh yeah i mean everybody in in liberal media loved obama um but particularly at our magazine where uh you know the the people who owned it were

they were they were just delirious about obama and so when i came to them and i and i said look i have to do this story about how this this bailout situation is corrupt

they weren't pleased but they ran if you can go back and look you'll see there's a story called obama's big Big Sellout.

It was like a 9,000-word feature that they let me run.

And

so that was like a year after he got into office.

But that was kind of the beginning of.

What did the piece say?

It basically said that

Obama had run as an economic populist.

and had talked a lot about reforming

certain things that had gone on on wall street that had allowed um

you know the excesses of the the mortgage bubble to happen yes and then as soon as

um he got elected he brought in all these acolytes um of uh

sorry the clinton's former treasury secretary rubin bob rubin uh so there

There were all these, Rubin was that Citigroup.

Obama brought a whole bunch of people close to Bob Rubin into the government, and you know, these were the same kind of people who had caused the crash, yes, right?

So, to me, I wrote it as kind of a bait and switch.

You know, he ran as somebody who was going to change the system, he brought in people who were the system, and in addition,

there was this bailout deal with city with Citigroup in particular that was that was kind of malodorous.

And

there were

there were people who ended up paying fines in that situation.

But

it was very critical of basically who Obama had brought in to run his economic policy.

And the idea was he had run as one thing and he was really another thing.

So that was one of the first stories of that type.

How did the Obama administration react to the piece?

They weren't happy.

If you go back and look,

there's an interview with Obama.

They did an official Rolling Stone interview with him years later where

he sort of brought up the fact that even your magazine talked about how I didn't do enough.

And this was like years after the fact.

And by the way, I had been incredibly complimentary of him while he was running, right?

So of all of the things that...

that had been written about him, what he remembered was this one slight, you know, which I thought was a very telling sign of his character, you know?

And,

but at the time i wasn't paying attention to the other things like about you know the continued prosecution of the war on terror you know the the drone assassination thing the kill list you know terror tuesdays all that stuff i didn't really clue into that because killing an american citizen with a drone yeah no exactly that that whole thing was incredible you know when you i mean i did a story later about another american who sued the government for because because he thought he was on the kill list

And,

you know, the government's response was: you're not entitled to find out whether you're on it or not.

You're on the kill list.

Yeah.

And

the whole idea that we even have something called like lethal action that it might apply to an American citizen, that you can do that without due process.

And, you know, if you go back and look, they basically invented, I mean, I don't know how disillusioning this was for you, but

they just made up on the fly

legal justifications for what they were doing that weren't grounded in any law that was passed or any court case.

They just sort of wrote themselves white papers giving themselves permission to do this stuff, which I think is crazy.

To this day, I think it's crazy.

Well, I found it totally shocking.

And I think I'm basically opposed to the death penalty anyway, but I think reasonable people can support the death penalty.

Absolutely.

If there's a trial.

Well, that's the point.

Right.

But there's a trial.

And the one thing you can never do is murder your own citizens because you exist to help your citizens.

That's the only reason we have the government.

Right.

Why do we have government?

It is a collective action on everyone's behalf, who's a citizen.

So the idea that you could kill an American citizen, and the first time, I mean, I think they've actually killed quite a few American citizens.

It turns out I didn't know that.

But the first time I became aware of it, it was, it was effectively a foreign national with a U.S.

passport.

The Awawaki.

Aww Waki.

And then, you know, supporting him was like, well, is he really an American?

Well, yeah, actually, he's an American citizen.

Yeah.

Like, that's the whole point.

You're either a citizen or not.

Right.

And I remember being really shocked by that.

Actually, it was glossed over in this weird way, right?

People were like, he's a terrorist.

Yeah, he's a terrorist.

Or terrorist adjacent.

Right.

Terroristy.

Yeah.

I mean, that's, you could probably call him a terrorist, but they killed his 16-year-old son, too.

And, but I.

So how did Obama explain that?

So, I mean, I remember he gave a speech.

I was looking at this just the other day where he

talked about, among other things,

they said that Al-Alaki had been tied to the coal bombing.

And I remember reading that and thinking, okay, well, he's saying that this is punishment for a crime,

but there's no trial, right?

We're pronouncing him guilty

and just executing the guy for something something that we say he did.

That seemed crazy to me, you know?

And I remember there was another white paper.

I believe Leon Panetta was involved in it, where the concept was, yes,

due process is required, but it doesn't have to involve the defendant.

right as long as there is a process right

uh it can be unilaterally us just talking about it and it can be post-execution Right.

Exactly.

Yeah.

But that stuff's all, it's all madness.

And I don't know.

I mean, I'd be curious to hear what you think.

I mean, I think when

we did those things and didn't make a big stink about it,

psychologically, we just crossed a line

into something else.

And

I feel like there's no going back once you once you.

So we were talking about this at dinner last night.

I mean, obviously you're coming from different poles, I guess.

Probably.

Well, it turns out not, but

in 1995, we would have been on exactly opposite sides.

But I think we both, given our similar age, had the same sort of gut level belief, which is whatever the U.S.

does abroad is in a completely different category from the way the government conducts itself domestically.

In other words, you can't treat American citizens like you would.

you know, the Houthis or something.

It's like there's one set of standards for the way we deal, conduct our foreign policy with foreigners and a completely different standard for the way the U.S.

government treats its own citizens who own the government.

It's their government, right?

Right.

Right.

Exactly.

I guess what I didn't realize because I was morally deficient and young and dumb was that once you start doing really evil things abroad, you're going to do them at home, actually.

Absolutely.

And you can't defend democracy by subverting democracy.

No.

And also, you're, you're,

you're basically denaturing the whole idea of democracy.

You're, you're, you're diluting it

once you start murdering people without due process.

It's not democracy anymore.

I mean, they use that term in a very facile way now constantly.

Oh, we have to protect democracy.

Well, what do you mean by that?

Are you going to protect democracy by censoring, right?

Like this is the whole thing that I've spent the last two years on.

If that's what you mean,

that's contradictory, right?

And, you know, that thing.

Contradictory in what sense?

Well, the First Amendment says that we don't do that, right?

Well, like

you can't protect the Bill of Rights by violating it.

Right.

And, you know, this, this whole

switch, and I was, I think,

like most Americans, I was like, you, I, I, we all knew that America, the United States was.

whacking people all over the world, right?

I mean, even though the church committee hearings came along and we basically said we weren't going to do that anymore, of course we were doing it, right?

We were doing all kinds of horrible things.

We were probably

fixing elections, you know, in half the places on earth, but not here, right?

Like that was a bright line for Americans.

Now, maybe that's chauvinistic to

believe in that, but I was like you.

I didn't think they would ever cross that line and come and bring these ideas home.

But, you know, this is what what we're finding out now.

I mean, this was the big theme of the Twitter files.

When we tried to figure out where...

So what are the Twitter?

Can you explain for people who didn't follow it at the time?

So in late 2022, after Elon Musk acquired

Twitter,

there started to be rumors that he was going to open up.

the internal communications of old Twitter and sort of give them to the world.

Right.

And it turned out to be true.

I got a call one day, or I got a note

sort of summoning me to San Francisco

from somebody at Twitter, let's put it that way.

And

so I was the first person

who was put on this project of looking, rummaging through old Twitter's

correspondence.

And

I think he said that Elon said that his idea was that he wanted to restore trust in the platform by telling people about the different kinds of censorship techniques that were going on.

It's not clear exactly what he was up to, but

he seemed sincere at the time.

He brought in me.

He brought in Barry Weiss.

Barry brought in a couple of other people like Michael Schellenberger.

Lee Fong ended up being involved.

Another reporter, really good young investigative reporter, maybe the last one, right?

Probably.

You know, he appeared.

And so there was a group of us.

And for about three months, we got to look through

the internal correspondence of one of the world's biggest communications companies.

And

the big thing that we found was that there was this nexus.

of communication between government enforcement and intelligence agencies and the internet platforms.

And they had a very sophisticated, organized bureaucracy that was involved with controlling content in a variety of different ways.

And

when we started to try to figure out, first of all, this was shocking to us.

We seeing all these documents that said flagged by FBI, flagged by FBI.

Just to be clear, that's a crime.

They're committing a crime by doing that.

That's illegal.

Probably.

The Bill of Rights.

I mean, it's just couldn't be clearer.

Yeah, you would think, right?

You know, I mean, I'm not a lawyer, but it looked bad to me, right?

uh certainly it looked like a story yeah no no question right um but we had to figure out where did this come from like how did this start and when we started asking questions you know it turned out that a lot of the programs that were now targeting domestic speech began as overseas uh counterterrorism uh sort of messaging programs right so the state department for instance has a has a thing called the global engagement center uh which is now

very much interested in speech both abroad and at home.

But they were once exclusively a sort of counter-ISIS

platform.

In fact, they had a different name back then.

They were called the CSCC.

In 2016, Obama rechristened them the Global Engagement Center, and they started to look inward.

And when I asked people who

I managed to talk to a couple of sources sources who worked at that agency, one phrase really stuck out.

It was CT to CP.

So that's counterterrorism to counterpopulism.

And the idea was the whole mission abroad of countering ISIS or al-Qaeda.

Contracting-wise, it was kind of drying up, right?

Because those threats have been somewhat neutralized.

But populism, you know, was now a very serious, it was viewed as a very serious threat

after

Occupy Wall Street, the Tea Party, the Arab Spring was something that maybe they didn't see as a bad thing, but they certainly saw the

transformative power of the internet platforms.

I think that freaked them out.

And the virus is communicable.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Then there was Brexit.

Then I think Trump was the last.

you know, the last stand for a lot of these folks.

And they, and that's when you started to see all these communications like, you know, know, we have to, we need to get a more formalized,

you know, control over these platforms.

And so, yeah, that's when the war on terror mission turned inward.

And I think that's a huge story, right?

Of, well, it's the, it's the end of the country we grew up in, right?

Yeah, you would think, you know, and that's,

you know, for me, it's been,

and I think probably for you too,

this new theme of

the sudden explosion of illiberal tactics in politics

that even if they're directed at somebody that

liberals hate, like Donald Trump or Steve Bannon, how can you not be freaked out by stuff like that?

We haven't used contempt of Congress to jail people since the Un-American Affairs Committee in 1947, right?

This is like third world kind of stuff that we're seeing,

you know,

accusing the frontrunner in a presidential campaign of 100 different felonies.

Is that happening if he's not running for president?

I mean, who could honestly say that, right?

It's

but you can't talk about it now.

I mean, if you, if you mention it, you're, you're out of the club and

mainstream press now, which is incredible to me.

You may have come to the obvious conclusion that the real debate is not between Republican and Democrat or socialist and capitalists, right and left.

The real battle is between people who are lying on purpose and people who are trying to tell you the truth.

It's between good and evil.

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And we hope we are on the former side.

That's why we created this network, the Tucker Carlson Network.

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So, I mean, it raises so many questions, but most obviously, then, if uncovering the abuse of power by the powerful, and particularly by government, isn't the point of journalism, it's clearly not the point of journalism anymore, what is the point?

Well, I mean,

then you become courtiers, right?

I mean, I think that's,

again, what's ironic for me is that, you know, this is, I saw this

process happening full circle.

You know, when I first got to Russia, the first reporters I met had worked at places like Komsomoska Pravda in the 80s, right?

Which were, at one time, it was the world's largest newspaper.

It had a circulation of 21 million or something like that.

And, you know, I worked in the old Pravda building when I was at the Moscow Times.

And the people there, you know, they would tell me stories about what their jobs were in the 80s.

And

it was like taking dictation.

They were clerks, basically, right?

You know, they would get whatever the message of the day was and they would do it and then go home to their wives and they would go fishing on the weekends.

And there was no, you know, intellectual anything involved with it.

You couldn't take it in that direction.

It would be hazardous to your to your health if you if you did.

Well, that's what journalism is now in America.

I mean, we look what just happened with the Nordstream thing, just to take an example, right?

Nordstream happens and there's no investigation whatsoever in any of the major newspapers.

How can that happen?

It's this major consequential thing that might have an impact on

starting a war with a nuclear power.

Oh, and it just wrecked the economy of Western Europe.

And it's a major ecological disaster, which you claim to care about.

So largest man-made emission of CO2 in history.

Right.

So, and if you think CO2 is driving the greatest threat that we face, the existential threat of climate change,

then you kind of want to know how that happened.

Right?

Wouldn't you?

Right.

Right.

You would think, you know.

So why wouldn't, I mean, it's, it's interesting.

I mean, I've spent a lot of time thinking about this because,

you know, I was like the only person in mainstream news to point it out that, no, Russia did not blow up Nord Stream and was attacked for it.

But I was wondering, like, if I'm at the New York Times, like a lot of people I know, why would I just like try to report that story out?

It's so interesting.

Like, why wouldn't they?

Yeah,

I have no idea.

You know, I mean, obviously, you're getting a signal from down on high that, you know, that's not wanted.

But it's different.

Okay.

So in the in the early 2000s, yes, there were high profile instances where people like Jesse Ventura were unhired from MSNBC because they they mistakenly thought he was pro-war when they hired him, right?

Phil Donahue is getting good ratings, but he's bounced, right?

I was there for that.

Yes.

Chris Hedges, you know,

I know.

And

Chris was sort of a classic example of a phenomenon that Noam Chomsky once wrote about in manufacturing consent, which is that they don't fire you necessarily, but like you just don't get promoted if you're considered the wrong kind of personality, which is weird because good investigative reporters should be difficult personalities, right?

If they're not.

they're probably not good reporters.

You know, I mean, just look at who our great reporters are.

They're independent-minded people.

Independent-minded people.

And, you know,

you want to experience them in little bursts.

Yeah, the most part.

I agree with that.

They're all kind of crazy, to be honest.

Yeah.

But that's okay.

It's part of the job.

Right.

But this is different.

Like there were a few instances like that back then of people who are critics of the war, whatever.

Now it's just this blanket.

If you step out of line on any one of two dozen different topics, you're out, you know?

And I think everybody's gotten that message.

And

that's the only thing that makes sense to me is like, so there are no brave people in all of journalism?

There are no honest men left?

Well, how can that?

I mean,

that it can't be possible, but it kind of is, right?

I mean, there's, there are a few people who

who I think tried to do a few things, you know?

But just to take the, look at the Russiagate story.

They made so many mistakes on that.

Jeff Gerth.

Okay, wait, so before you, I want, let's put you at the center of this because you were one of the reasons we're having this conversation is you were one of the only liberals in all media who said, and you speak Russian, you live there for 10 years, like you have credibility on this question, I would say.

And you were the only ones who said, you know, I don't like Trump.

I didn't vote for Trump, but like, I don't think this is real.

I had a book out at the time called Insane Clown President about Donald Trump.

Right?

I mean, I'm not a fan of the guy, right?

But they came to me.

So, so where were you when the Russiagate thing started?

I was at Rolling Stone.

And what did you think when you first heard that he was a Russian agent?

So

it was in late 2016.

It was right after he had gotten elected.

You remember that list that came out, Proper Not?

Well, the Washington Post had this story about this weird blacklist that they had discovered of people who the Russians were supposedly in league with.

And it was this shadowy organization called Proper Not.

And they linked to this list of

sites.

And,

you know, without any evidence at all, they were linking all kinds of independent journalists to Russia.

And I thought, well, that's crazy.

And then

there was this whole thing about

I actually had to do a segment

on MSNBC with Chris Hayes.

The other guest was Malcolm Nance of all people.

And

it was all about, you know, is Trump in league

before he got inaugurated, is Trump,

you know, in league with the Russians?

There just been a big leak about that.

And I thought, well, there's no evidence for this, right?

Like we just had a catastrophic episode in journalism with the WMD thing where anonymous sources get us in a lot of trouble.

If you can't recreate the experiment in the lab, you got to be careful of that story, right?

And that's all I said.

I wasn't like, he's innocent, you know, like, I just thought,

this is a dangerous story.

Let's all be careful with this.

And immediately there was this

reaction that was just shocking to me.

It was, it was like this shunning thing.

It happened to me.

It happened to, you know, Greenwald, obviously, Aaron Mate at the nation.

There was like a group letter that was written by the rest of the staff,

you know, denouncing him,

you know, the husband of the editor of the of the nation also, the Stephen Cohen.

They didn't want him around.

Wonderful man.

He was.

Yeah, absolutely.

He was a good friend of mine.

But

it was crazy because this was so early in the process.

And everybody had already predetermined that this thing was true, this extraordinary complicated thesis.

They had somehow already arrived at the conclusion that it was proven.

And

at this point, you didn't know either way.

I didn't really know either way, but I had a strong suspicion that it was wrong, right?

Like, this,

you know, journalists have a sense or the sixth sense.

This doesn't smell right, right?

Like, it's kind of like the French connection where,

you know, Gene Hackman looks over and he says, that's a wrong table, right?

Like, this was a wrong table.

It didn't look right.

And I felt the same way.

Yeah.

And it was too complicated for me to see.

I wish I had known at the beginning.

Even in right-wing world where I then worked and lived, I felt like everyone believed it.

Yeah.

But how is that possible?

Well, I remember saying to somebody, you know, I think this is, I think this could be like complete bullshit, like actual bullshit.

And my friend goes, be careful.

Be careful.

I think there's something there.

I was like, okay.

By the way, I try to be very open-minded.

Like, I don't know.

Right.

Maybe you're actually a space alien.

I don't know.

Prove it to me.

Right.

I really try to keep every possibility open.

But I kept asking people, like, what, okay, how do we know this?

Right.

Everybody believed it.

Yeah.

Why?

You know, they hated Trump.

That was obvious, you know,

but that wasn't enough for me.

Right.

Like

just on a superficial level, it didn't fit.

Donald Trump, you want to tell me he's involved in some mob deal to build a casino in Atlantic City or something like that.

Right.

Like I'd, I'd I'd believe that.

Donald Trump being James Bond and involved in a five-year conspiracy with

the Russian government, you know, what did Steele call it?

A well-developed conspiracy of five years.

That's ridiculous.

This is a guy who,

if you've been to any of his campaign speeches, he can't get through the first sentence of one of his scripts.

Like his brain is already off in another direction.

How is that guy going to keep a secret?

It didn't make any sense.

And

nobody had any evidence.

And then even when things came out that should have been fatal to the story, like when it finally came out in October of 2017, that the Clinton campaign had funded the Steele dossier.

I thought, well, that

it's over now, right?

With a Republican donor, too.

Well, yes.

Yeah.

Sort of previously, right?

Steele

didn't come on until later.

But still, once that came out and

you knew that campaign research had ended up in an intelligence assessment,

that should have been it, I thought.

And everybody just plowed ahead like it was still a thing.

So what happened to you in the middle of all?

So you're at Rolling Stone.

You're this famous liberal reporter, one of the most famous liberal reporters, actually.

And you make the mistake of saying, well, we don't know for a fact this is true.

People start shunning you.

Where does it go from there?

So then I started to get angry about it.

And

at one point I went,

oh, because,

you know, I don't like to be told what to do.

I don't like to be told that I got to ignore something.

Right.

You know,

I'm one of those difficult personalities in journalism, right?

Like, you know, it just happens that way.

But I went to Rolling Stone at one point.

I had really good editors there for the most part, but I went to them and I said,

look, this story's is wrong, right?

And it's going to come out that it's wrong.

Give me eight weeks to chase this down and let's let's be the first mainstream organization to get it right and and put it to bed and it'll be a coup for us, right?

You know, let me let me do my thing on this.

And they said no, the first time they ever said no to me on, you know, like an investigative.

And just to restate, you speak Russian.

You can read Russian.

So there's like probably no one better to do the story.

Yeah, I would think, right?

You know, I even had some sources over there, right, who could have chased it down, you know, certain aspects of it down, like, you know, the Trump Tower deal and all that stuff.

Like, that would have been relatively easy to go through.

And I had covered Congress.

So the people who were investigating this, like,

I knew some of those folks too.

And

it's a great story.

I mean, when it first came out, it was obvious.

This is either the biggest biggest intelligence coup in history, right?

The Russians getting a Manchurian candidate in the White House, or it's the biggest fake in history, right?

The biggest setup in history.

Somebody's either telling the biggest whopper ever or the Russians have just pulled off the most amazing thing.

There's no other option.

Yes.

Right.

So

if it's not this, it's that.

And we might as well be the first to report that, right?

Yes.

So what did they say when you make that?

They said, no, on what grounds?

I don't even, I mean, I don't even remember what the excuse was.

They just weren't enthused about the idea, you know?

And

I understood that, you know, like the, look, they're a Rolling Stone.

They have a, they have an audience that has certain expectations.

But that was a, that was a big moment for me, you know.

I mean, I was naive.

I, I actually thought they, you know, that the magazine would be interested in going there because they had let me you know go against obama before they had let me do other things but not on this so

um

so how what did your colleagues say to you because by this point

think it was becoming public to anyone who was watching like me that you were dissenting from the line on this question yeah so

i would say glenn greenwall took the brunt of it um you know there were stories in the the new yorker profiles you know the bane of their resistance, right?

Like, why is Glenn Greenwald being a stick in the mud about this Russia thing?

That was like a feature topic in magazines, like a bunch of them.

And,

you know,

and they concluded, by the way, that he was motivated by

his impatience with the rise of women and minorities in the Democratic Party.

He was a racist.

Right.

Glenn's a racist.

I actually had the physical copy of the New Yorker.

Did they say that?

They did, yeah.

And it was, it was an on-the-record quote by one of his former editors of all things.

The Glenn's a racist.

Yeah.

Well, they didn't.

Right.

He's impatient with the rise of women and minorities.

So when I saw that, I'm like, wow, this is like, what is going on with this?

Right.

And meanwhile, you know, I was getting it from all angles.

There were former Russian, former American diplomats who were going after me online saying I was in league with Putin.

And, you know, seriously?

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's kind of a heavy charge.

Yeah,

you would think, you know,

and that was becoming increasingly common.

It was an implication of a lot of the back and forth on social media.

you know, that this person is too close to Russia or, you know, he loves Putin, right?

Like that, that kind of a thing.

Had you ever worked as a secret agent for putin of course not no

are you kidding i am kidding actually it's so nuts you just said you left russia because you didn't like the vibe under putin i mean we

we we put putin in the cover of our newspaper like in drag carrying a dominatrix whip you know like yeah the the we we lampooned him constantly and um and i actually even i did some journalism in russian for another paper that was very critical of him and talked about the apartment bombings and some other stuff.

And

so I was no friend of Vladimir Putin's, but that became a common thing in journalism.

And it's,

it was just so shocking.

And I, I knew at that point that my time was

limited at, you know, at Rolling Stone, which I loved the place.

I really loved that place.

It was, and it's a great gig, too.

Um, but there was no way I was going to be able to stay under those circumstances.

How long did you last?

Until

2020, I guess.

So 15 years roughly.

You know, maybe, maybe 16, I guess.

So

it was a great time.

So when it became clear that, you know, the claim that Putin had installed Trump as the American president, when it became clear that was like malicious fantasy, it was a total lie.

Did any of the people who attacked you and called you a Russian agent apologize or change their minds?

Of course not.

Did any of them apologize to you?

No, but it's a little different because by that point, I was like such an outlaw that I had no expectation of being treated fairly by anyone ever other than my wife.

So I, I was just, no, I'm serious.

By that, you know, I was just like, your head changes, but you were very much at

like everyone liked you.

And I mean, you were not an outlaw.

Right.

And then, but you became an outlaw kind of overnight.

Right.

Yes.

No.

Yeah.

No.

No.

No.

My name is sort of,

you know, synonymous with,

you know, reactionary troll, you know, that kind of thing.

And that happened basically overnight.

It was a little tough to take for a few years there, but,

you know, I got over it relatively quickly.

I moved to Substack, which was

it turned out to be a great thing,

and

which is an independent platform.

And, you know, I was one of the first people who

kind of left big mainstream media to do the self-publishing thing and

discovered that there was actually

a functioning business model there.

I mean,

I'd been in journalism for 30 years and had never seen it as anything but a dying business, right?

There was never any money that you were actually going to make, right?

If you're making 100 grand, you're like psyched.

Yeah, exactly.

And then all all of a sudden it turns out that there's actually this huge market out there because people hate journalism, right?

Like that, that's the problem.

When you're in mainstream media, you don't see that there's actually this screaming need for something else that people aren't getting because they don't trust regular media.

So

I was an early beneficiary of that whole thing.

But it was a default, though.

I mean, you probably would have stayed at

the New Yorker or Rolling Stone or where you were Rolling Stone forever, right?

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Had this not happened, I would have been there.

You know, I was very loyal to the magazine.

You know, I stuck up for them always, even when they were wrong, even during the UVA thing.

You know, I said, look, they made a mistake, but we're doing the right thing.

We're auditing, we're self-auditing.

Like, you know, this is a great magazine.

We have a great

tradition, et cetera, et cetera.

I was kind of a company man in a...

in an embarrassing kind of way.

But when the Russia thing happened,

you you know, all bets were off.

And I wasn't the only one.

There were other people in the business that this also happened to.

But none of them came back the way that you did.

I mean, Glenn did.

Well, Glenn, for sure.

Yeah.

Well, very few.

Yeah, a few.

Did you think about just hanging it up and becoming a translator or doing something else?

No, I mean, I love this job.

You know,

after initially not really loving

journalism, I learned to really love it

while I was at Rolling Stone.

And then

now,

additionally,

I think the country needs journalists.

And

the thing that you need most of all in journalism to be good at it is

you need to have some bravery.

That wasn't true in American journalism for a long time.

Probably,

you know, not since the Vietnam days or the Red Scare, you know, was there a situation where there was a real social price to pay for

taking

a certain stance on things.

Now there is, right?

And if you're going to do certain kinds of reporting,

you're going to lose all your friends, but that's the job, you know?

And not many people are willing to do that.

I am willing to do that

because

I never expected to keep friends in this business.

So

I think

it's unfortunately an exciting time to be a journalist, but

I would feel wrong to quit now.

I'm sure you probably feel the same way.

I do feel the same way.

It's exactly how I feel.

Actually, nicely put.

Yeah, you don't.

Yeah, that's right.

If you're in it to make friends, you're

probably in the wrong business.

Go to church.

Right.

Yeah, exactly.

But

tell us about like having been in institutional journalism, you know, at the top of it, really, and then finding yourself like having to

work for yourself.

Like, what are the advantages and disadvantages?

Well, first of all, being in institutional journalism

is a little bit overrated, right?

Like, I think,

um, because I came from alternative journalism.

Yeah, I

had financed my own newspaper in Moscow.

Um,

and

you know, I did everything from printing to running the plates to the printing press and,

you know, selling ads, everything.

So,

you know,

the business is something that I've always been familiar with.

And suddenly being involved with a big organization, it's nice, but I don't see it as a prerequisite.

I thought it was really funny at the beginning of Trump's reign when a couple of the reporters were

complaining about losing their White House press credentials.

It's like, who cares, right?

You're supposed to be on the outside.

Exactly.

Right?

Like, what are you whining about?

You know, do the job.

Have you been to a White House briefing?

I have.

Yes.

Yes.

Then you know how soul-killing it is.

You learn nothing.

You're captive.

You eat lunch out of a vending machine.

Everybody has got like the most distorted value system.

Like they're so impressed by their hard passes.

And they're all such losers.

Like if you would,

you would quit the business, right?

If you had to do that.

Absolutely.

In fact, one of the first things that I was assigned to do when I went to Rolling Stone, they sent me on a campaign junket with John Kerry.

So I was on the plane with Kerry during that campaign for like a month or something like that.

And, you know, it's a similar dynamic to the White House Press Corps.

It's the same people every single day.

It's very clubby.

They have extremely.

Right.

So there's even seating arrangements, right?

So

the New York Times gets to sit in the front and then they kind of, it's almost, it's like Heathers or Mean Girls.

You, they, you know, according to how well known you are in the business, you, you have to sit further and further back in the plane, right, or farther back in the plane.

Um, and at the very back, or the cameraman, yeah, exactly.

And, and they, at the time, they were angry at Alexander Pelosi because she had filmed some of them.

So, she was in the back with a bunch of camera, a bunch of piles of equipment.

But, um,

but I got frustrated very quickly by the fact that all they were doing all day long was just taking

um

you know press releases from flax and then they would eat they would they would be given these macaroni and cheese butterfingers yeah

so i went on a hunger strike uh

in my first trip i i had this like epiphany that they're just giving me too much stuff i'm just not going to take anything from any of these people and i stopped eating i stopped taking the press releases um

the only one who didn't get fat on a campaign yeah exactly right um and and when we got to the events, I would not go to the events.

I would run a mile in any direction and just talk to anybody about anything but the campaign.

Because the

like, this isn't journalism.

You're sitting there just being, just taking something and then converting it into a press release.

Like, what is that?

You know, but the White House is even worse because they have.

they have airs about it.

Right.

And, you know, even though I haven't done that beat, you know,

for I think it's an important beat.

Like you have to, somebody has to ask the president questions, but they don't for the most part.

Right.

I know.

Do they?

I've never seen it.

Right.

So, you know, I don't know.

At best, you get some reporter whose goal is not to elicit information, but just to prove that he's like an antagonist of the president.

Right.

Exactly.

You know, thanks, Dan, rather.

But it doesn't advance the story in any meaningful way.

Right.

Right.

Exactly.

What they want is, and that's what they were, they were upset about the Jim Acostas of the world.

They were upset that they were being denied this,

you know, saleable piece of video where they could stand up and do this, you know, and gesticulate.

And

I always wondered with Jim Acosta, who I don't know, but I always wondered, Jim Acosta was always telling me what a journalist he was.

And a lot of guys were like this,

including some I've worked with, but I'm a journalist.

Okay.

Tornado Comes Through Trailer Park.

Give me 750 words on that.

Like, I don't think they're capable of writing a story.

Do you ever think that?

Like, could Jim Acosta actually just write like a news story or even an expository essay?

Well, I wonder about that because are they even, you know, once not that long, not to be all back in the day about it, but

you wouldn't have gotten a job in the White House press corps if you hadn't come through, you know, covering town meetings and all that stuff.

I mean,

you know, I did that.

I covered, I covered aldermen.

I covered, you know, the police beat fires, stuff like that.

You have to be able to do that stuff.

And that's the basics of the job is, you know, showing up, talking to people on the street, talking to this person, that person.

You have to be able to do crime reporting, you know.

Got it.

And you got to talk to people who are on the other side of the law, all that stuff.

I don't think they can do that.

I mean, I remember seeing somebody, I forget what organization it was, but somebody, one of the kind of mainstream sort of web-only sites,

one of their columnists was talking about how much he hated the telephone.

And I thought, what journalist hates the telephone?

How can you do this job if you hate the telephone, right?

And it's because the new thing is they decide what they think.

They find links that support their ideas.

And then they just type the thing.

Whereas, you know, what you're supposed to do is talk to everybody, then figure out what the story is.

To add information to the story.

Right.

Right.

Not just,

you know, the snake eating its tail.

It's just all self-reference, actually.

Right.

Exactly.

Exactly.

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So you get out of that.

So the business model works in independent media?

Well, kind of, right?

So it works if you're if you're cranking out content.

What I don't think it's they they figured out how to do is how to monetize like investigative journalism right which takes a long time it's expensive it's expensive and you don't you're not producing stuff that's

you know every couple of days and even when you do it's not always the stuff that people like people like reading you know op-eds that with strong takes that you can make money doing that right also you whiff sometimes i mean a lot of stories don't it happens to me even now a lot you You waste a lot of time on stuff that's not real or not provable.

Right.

Or, or you think that people are going to go bananas over something and they don't.

There's that.

Right.

Yeah.

What stories have you had that you thought would make a splash have an effect, but that were sort of instantly forgotten?

Well, I don't know about forgotten, but I would say that a lot of the Twitter file stuff,

I expected that to be.

I mean, I naively expected a lot of that stuff to be.

So give us an example of what shocked you that you discovered during that reporting.

So,

one of the things was that Twitter, heading into the 2020 election,

had worked out a system with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence,

whereby they had what they called an industry meeting, where once it started off once a month, then it was once a week, where these intelligence officials were meeting with Twitter and about two dozen other internet platforms and briefing them on things that they might expect in the information landscape.

And then there was a system by which

basically Twitter was receiving

recommendations about content.

from the federal government through the FBI, and then from the states through the Department of Homeland Security.

It was that organized they like they had worked it out that like if it comes from you know a local police department it's going to come from the dhs if it comes from the hhs it's going to come through the fbi right like so they had a very organized system of flags that

um where you you would see the fbi say you know for your consideration, here are some accounts that may violate your terms of service.

And there'd be an attached spreadsheet with 400 account names on it.

And that was just happening constantly.

It was an industrial process that they had worked out.

And I thought that's a huge story, right?

Like this, here's the FBI that's devoting resources to looking at social media accounts of ordinary people and worrying about terms of service violations.

Like, what is that?

Why are they not looking for child predators?

Right.

And so, what was that?

Well, it's

part of this sort of spiraling, sprawling thing where a whole series of government agencies are very intensely interested in what's online and who's reading what and in developing new ways of

suppressing content, de-amplifying other things.

And with COVID, there was a really, really intense effort to

to create rules about what could and could not be seen.

They would decide that things were.

Um, one of the key concepts that I thought was really, really disturbing was

uh this whole idea that anything that promotes vaccine hesitancy is a kind of disinformation, even if it's not uh factually incorrect.

So, if somebody dies after they get the shot, right,

that may be true,

but

internally at the company, they're uh but knowing that might convince other people not to take the shot.

Exactly.

And so

they looked at that as a kind of disinformation, even though it's true.

Disinformation doesn't mean untrue, correct?

Exactly.

It carries the connotation.

The definition involves falsity, right?

Or misinformation even, right?

So disinformation is like the intentional spreading of

lies, right?

But even misinformation,

Homeland Security has something they called the MDM, or they had it, the MDM committee, which is misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation committee.

And malinformation is,

it's just material.

It's true, but kind of politically wrong, right?

Or inconvenient.

And that could be something that

promotes vaccine hesitancy.

We have the Supreme Court case now, Murphy v.

Missouri, that's partly related to the Twitter files.

And the plaintiffs and a couple of the three of the plaintiffs in that case are doctors who were, who had published true research about COVID,

but were suppressed, were de-amplified.

They were put on, you know, in Twitter.

They were put on trends blacklists because.

you know, their research tended to go against federal policies about lockdowns and vaccination and all kinds of things.

So,

to me, that's what the First Amendment is there for, right?

Like, we do not want the government in a role of deciding what's true and untrue, because once you do that, the government has a monopoly on misinformation.

The only protection against that happening is absolutely unfettered free speech.

And they're messing with that, you know,

because

I think there's just this gradual moving away from belief that all the concepts in the Bill of Rights work.

And so this, but what we looked at in terms of the censorship,

it's very much in evidence there where they just don't believe that the First Amendment works, I don't think.

But they're the government.

They exist to protect the First Amendment.

That's the whole point of having a government, right?

So again, that seems like a prima facie crime to me.

And as you said, at very least, a huge story.

what happened to that story once you reported it i was denounced as a as a right-wing tool right um

the washington post their first story about the twitter about the twitter files described me as conservative journalist matt tape

uh

and then they they did a silent i would i would beg to differ yeah

uh it was just ridiculous and then and you know the that was the line all the way through even though the the the reports really they weren't really about suppression of one political party or another.

They were really much more about this process, which is just so scary, right?

And nobody, nobody in the regular press really picked it up.

And that was a shocker to me because I thought, well, somebody's got to be interested in this, you know?

And they weren't, you know.

How long were you there?

At Twitter doing the story,

you know, three and a half months, I would say.

So we got a lot of stuff.

We got, you know, probably, I mean, not a lot, you know, 200,000 emails, something like that, attachments.

We still haven't gone through all of it.

But

the big thing was that there was just lots of evidence of this interplay between government and these platforms.

I think Elon at one point said publicly that there were Intel operatives working at Google, at Twitter, rather.

Lots of them.

Working there.

Lots of them.

And that was another thing we didn't understand

when we first got there.

We're like,

why is there a

CIA person here?

Why is this person a former national security council operative?

Like, what value add do they bring to a tech company?

A tech company.

I couldn't understand that.

But they're actually working there as employees.

Yeah.

And they were making a lot of the big decisions about content, too.

In fact, one of the biggest emails that we found was there was a debate about whether or not Twitter had the ability to say no to,

in this case, it was a State Department request about content.

And the

former CIA employee says, you know, our window on that is closing

as our government partners become more aggressive in their attributions.

Right.

So what they were basically saying is, we're running, our ability to like push back is

evaporating, you know, and that I think has turned out to be true with these platforms.

They're increasingly increasingly just sort of intertwined with

the state.

Yeah.

So state media.

Yeah.

And

this is another continuation of the war on terror thing because they began by demanding that these companies fork over

information about geolocation of users in other places around the world, even in the United States.

But now they're venturing into content, right?

And content domestically that people see.

So Google's the biggest, of course, of all these companies and by far the most influential as a monopoly on search, which is your window into all information.

Right.

If we were ever to see what goes on internally at Google, what do you think we would learn?

Well, I think we would find that

they have massively

changed the formula for

search returns.

I mean, they even talked about this in 2017 and 2018 when they had this thing called Project OWL,

which was designed to change the

parameters of the search towards something they called authority.

And authority was basically the way it was explained to me when I talked to somebody at Google, it was like, if you search for baseball five years ago, you might have seen your local little league team.

Now you'll see MLB.com come up first, right?

And,

you know, you've probably noticed this when when you do a Google search, you know, the first 40 or 50 results will all be of a certain type.

And you'll have to, it's much, much harder to find kind of this counter narrative

version of reality now.

Even if you know exactly what you're looking for or type in the

title of the story, it's made reporting harder.

don't you think?

Yeah, I mean, it's, yeah, it's, it, it actually challenges your understand like what is reality.

Right.

Right.

So, um, I mean, the potential for mind control, or in fact, the reality of mind control by the state and by affiliated actors dependent on the state or living in a symbiotic relationship with the state,

it's like it's almost impossible to have independent thoughts at this point.

Yeah.

I mean, if, if the, if most people are getting their information through these searches

and through social media exchanges and those things are heavily, heavily, you know,

managed,

then everybody's getting a skewed version of reality.

And that's going to change the way that they think about everything.

I think that's really dangerous.

Obviously,

it's not a new concept because we all read about it and Orwell and

Aldous Huxley and all these other books.

But

what happens to people when they're getting their information in a way that's completely inorganic and false?

And,

you know, I think we have to get to the bottom of that.

I don't know.

I think it's scary.

Do you think

there's been any slackening of it?

I mean, we're in the middle of an election season right now.

Pretty clear that the people in charge in both parties will do anything to stop Trump.

And for reasons probably have nothing to do with Trump, actually, but bigger story.

But whatever the cause, they're totally determined to control the outcome of this election.

Yeah.

Well, can you have a democracy under those circumstances?

I don't think so.

So there was a Supreme Court case.

There's one that's still going on,

Murphy v.

Missouri.

And

originally, the lower courts ruled that the federal government can't be

doing that back and forth with all these platforms.

And from what I understood, there was a little bit of a backing off point, right, where they weren't so intimately involved.

But just about a month ago, Senator Mark Warner had a talk and he said that essentially the companies have begun

talking to the agencies again.

This was after

the Supreme Court held a hearing, you know, the hearing on that case, and it didn't look so good for the free speech advocates afterwards.

So,

you know,

that tells me that they're already

thinking of coming up with another program.

I know for a fact

for stories that

I'm working on, that there are a couple of different contracting ideas for new

sort of content review programs that would be partnerships with government in the same way that there were the last time around.

Like the last time around, we had this thing called the Election Integrity Partnership.

It was run out of Stanford, but it was done in partnership with the Department of Homeland Security and the Global Engagement Center, which is at the State Department

and the University of Washington and some other partners.

But that was a

thing where there was a big organized content flagging operation that involved the government.

They're going to do something like that again.

It's just a question of like who's going to do it, what the method is going to be.

And my understanding is that they're, you know,

it's going to be more aggressive this time around.

So there have been a number of war games,

right, where academics, NGO officials, government officials, it's all sort of this blob.

It's kind of hard to disaggregate it, but

have gamed out various election scenarios.

And it does, it sounds a little more to me, like contingency planning than like an academic exercise.

But tell me what you know about that well it's interesting that you're bringing that up um so you may have noticed in the news lately uh that there have been a lot of um stories warning about ai deep fakes yeah uh this is the new if russia was the the

the excuse for getting involved in content moderation in 2020 or even 2018, AI and deep fakes are the new buzzword in Washington.

I thought it was just a way to explain away your porn tapes.

That's right.

Yeah, exactly.

I didn't make this.

It's a deep fake.

But this is something that somebody tipped me off to.

Now, this is not like a secret.

It's actually public, although nobody has.

brought it up.

There is a website that's out there.

But this is a game.

It's basically Elections and Dragons.

It's made by NQTEL.

You You can see the IQT here, which is the venture capital arm of the CIA.

And it is a...

Stop.

Why does the CIA have a venture

arm?

Because to develop technologies that

would otherwise probably be prohibited.

And

because there's a lot of things that they get into that maybe are good money-making ideas.

I mean, part of what being in the intelligence business is about is getting out and making money, right?

So,

but that's, I mean, that's that's kind of a problem if your intel agencies have venture arms, yes, right.

You would think that would be a problem.

Um, so this is a CIA-funded election game, yep, it's a CIA-funded election game, and and just just to start, just like Dungeons and Dragons, it has funny dice.

This is a 10-sided die.

For the record, are you making this up?

Is this real?

This is real.

This is real.

Haywire is the name of the game.

And

if you roll the NQTEL symbol, right,

it says on why I'm laughing, it's so dark.

It's it says on the back, um, if you roll

basically, the whole the premise of the game is that you are trying to avoid a haywire situation, meaning a an AI-induced disaster where the voters get what they want, basically.

Yeah, so if if you roll the NQTEL logo, it says haywire reverted.

So, basically, if you roll CIA, you win, right?

Yeah, the CIA venture logo looks a little bit like the

symbol for nuclear power.

It does look a little bit like that, yes.

So this game is used to train,

from what I understand, it's used to train people in government to war game out scenarios that may happen, right?

Which is why

this is so

some of these scenarios are so incredible.

Like if an orange populist were to somehow become president again.

Well, right.

And

when I went through these, I know obviously I just opened this box, but I have, but I have another one.

The one that really jumped out at me is this thing called the purple disappeared.

The purple disappeared.

If you could read out what it says.

Swing states appear safe on the national electoral map and early polling.

Later, it emerges that AI-driven election forecasts were wrong because the data scientists overlooked significant partisan differences that make swing states highly competitive.

Discuss your response plan, then draw two injects.

Real-world harm, it says at the bottom, misinformation/slash social bias, heightened stress, anxiety, and depression.

What's social bias mean?

I am actually, I have no idea,

but but that certainly sounds to me like they're asking the game players to come up with

a plan for

some kind of reaction to election results that don't necessarily square with what the polls were indicating, right?

I mean, that's basically what they're saying

in that scenario.

Here's another one, Mind Games.

An easy-to-use voice model helps create a viral video suggesting that one of the candidates may have dementia.

Suggest it, discuss your response plan and draw two injects.

So it's just full of stuff like this.

And this, you know, we started to hear about

this idea that there were people in this information management slash censorship slash

content moderation space that were

deeply involved with you know finding new ways to manage

information that people see um you know back in 2010 the army actually uh got rid of the term psyop because they thought it had negative common connotations they brought it back in 2017 because there there was a widespread belief that um we have to engage in uh influence operations that because Russia is already doing it, because China is already doing it,

we need to do it.

And it's the same thing.

It's aimed at our own population.

Yeah, and that's the thing.

We did this before previously.

We created phony social media accounts in Arabic and Pashto, right?

And that's something that we've understood.

What's different is that they're now doing this in English, right?

And they're now aiming this at domestic populations.

I thought that was illegal.

I would think it's illegal.

I think a lot of this behavior is just unregulated, not looked at.

I mean, who's going to go in and tell them they can't do this?

What body is going?

I mean, it's the New York Times, the Washington Post.

Democracy dies in darkness.

I mean,

that is the role of the press.

Yes, but to expose excesses and roll them back by exposing them.

But the problem is that

they see, for instance, Donald Trump and

you know the the the trump movement as an extension of what they what they might call the russian information ecosystem they say like the global engagement center the state department has this concept of information ecosystem so if you're too in alignment with russian foreign policy views on say ukraine or something like that you are you can be part of the ecosystem even if you have nothing to do with that country.

So the idea that you know

you know the first head of the global engagement center is a former editor of time magazine uh rick stengel he wrote a book called information wars that we all had to read when we were doing the twitter files because we didn't know about this organization

you know talked openly about how he thought uh the trump campaign

In it, he recognized the same techniques that he saw from ISIS and from Russia.

So they're now, they see all this as all part of a peace, you know?

And that is what I think is dangerous is that we're sort of bringing the ethos of military counter messaging from the war on terror.

We're bringing that home.

And the enemy is now the domestic voter.

Right.

Okay.

So military messaging, but the purpose of military is to kill people in the end and to deter war by the threat of killing people.

But basically it's killing.

That's their business.

Killing, yes, but also trying to discourage recruitment, right?

Of course, right?

Right.

Of course.

But fundamentally, if you were to say, like, what's the purpose of a military?

It's to exert force, physical force.

So if the U.S.

military is turning its psyops on the country, like, that's, it's not that far, you know, the nature of organizations and mission creep from there to like hurting people.

Exactly, exactly.

And they, and, and they, they actually, you'll find NATO, we found NATO papers that talked about how they found found the American belief in

inform, not influence, or, you know,

truthfulness.

That was actually, that's part of

an old NATO memo about influence operations, that

you can't tell untruths.

The more modern belief is that that's outdated, that because the Russians don't do that, that we have to,

we shouldn't have those restraints.

we have to worry now about sort of phony influence operations in the United States.

And if you look at it in that things through that lens, suddenly things like Russia

start to make a little bit more sense, right?

Because you can imagine somebody in the intelligence service is saying, well, Donald Trump is part of this

nexus of

anti-American forces and

anything's fair game against that kind of person.

So what Russia is central to all of this in the minds of the people doing it?

And from my perspective, as someone who's never been that interested in Russia, the country, you sort of wake up one day and, you know, 25 years after the end of the Cold War and realize you're required to hate Russia.

And I just refuse to go along with that on principle, not because I love Russia.

I do kind of like Russia, actually, having been there, but I didn't have any feelings about it a year ago.

Right.

And, but I just, I'm an adult man and I don't want to be told what to think.

And I'm not going to be, period, under any circumstances because I'm not a slave.

So,

but unanswered is the question, like, why?

Why, why is that a requirement of living in the United States where I've lived my whole life hating Russia?

Like, what does that have to do with anything?

Like, how did we get there of all countries?

What is this?

I don't understand that either.

And also, you don't?

I mean,

especially compared to when Russia actually was

a major,

I mean, it wasn't nearly this intense in the 70s and 80s.

I was here.

It was not.

Right?

Of course not.

In fact, people said, I mean, Russia was actually running actual psyops against the United States.

AIDS was created at Fort Meade to kill black people.

You know, all these things.

Like, that's, that was a Russian active measures campaigns.

Big time.

And, and of course, there were all these proxy wars going on even then in Mozambique.

And there were like actual wars.

And

the prevailing view among people I knew was, you know, Soviets are bad.

Of course, no one's pro-Soviet in normal person world, but it would be kind of nice to be at peace.

And nuclear war is really scary.

And like, let's avoid that.

I mean, that was the view that I remember as a child, right?

Sure, yeah.

I mean, we had Sting telling us the Russians love their children too.

Which is true.

And, you know, when Gorbachev came on the scene, I remember very distinctly people saying,

you know,

we have to find a way to get along with these people, like that, the we're spending too much money on

defense and that

this is costing both of our societies.

But that's not where we're at now.

And oddly enough, the current American government,

it feels a lot like the Soviet government of the early 80s, right?

Where Joe Biden would have fit in perfectly in the Politburo of the early 80s.

Right.

Yeah.

I mean, he is the doddering old physically dead leader

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We definitely plus are good looking, I will say.

Right.

I mean,

the Russians have a joke where Gorbachev gets in the

limousine.

He's late for work, so he drives too fast.

The cops pull him over.

And

Gorbachev's driver is drunk, passed out in the back.

So he had to drive himself.

He gets stopped by the police, and the cop sees him, salutes, goes back to the car, and the other cop says, who is that?

And he goes, I don't know, but Garbachov was his driver.

And that's how you feel about America now.

Who's running this country?

Does anybody know?

Who is running the country?

Is it Jake Sullivan?

I mean, you'd have to make a guess, would you?

Wouldn't you?

I mean, somebody has to have the final say about these things.

And it can't be Biden.

I just think that's a very weird thing to not know.

And no one seems curious about it either.

Right.

Where are the stories about that?

Who's that?

Well, I mean, the the Wall Street Journal just did a story about that.

Read it.

They broke the seal on that.

It is kind of a silly, dishonest story, but in it were

quite a silly, dishonest story, I thought, but whatever.

But there were certainly things in there that had not been in the Wall Street Journal or a big paper before, for sure.

Right.

Right.

They they took a you know, they dipped the toe in the leg of.

Right.

Yeah.

But still, you know, you, in a real country, we would be scrambling to find out,

well, the president is clearly not capable.

So what's going on?

You know,

nothing.

There's not a hint of anything, which is just, it's, it's so bizarre.

Well, and especially given the consequences, I mean, if this were 1995, you could sort of say it sort of runs on autopilot.

And, you know, Tim Cook and the captains of industry can pitch in and sort of keep us on the track.

I mean, that would be the view, right?

But now we are on the brink.

We're closer to nuclear war than we've ever been, closer than the Cuban Missile Crisis right now.

Right.

To total nuclear annihilation.

And if the commander-in-chief is non-compass menace, and I mean, we're the ship is listing, it's on its side.

Where are the people saying,

you know, I hate Trump, I love Biden, politics don't even matter at this level.

We're on the verge of nuclear war.

That's not acceptable.

Let's pull back.

I have not even heard any person say that.

What is that?

I don't know.

Where's the public concern about that either?

I mean, if this were 1986

and we were at this level of antagonism with Russia, if there had been an exploded pipeline, if there was a shooting war

in Ukraine, right, or some kind of proxy territory where our weapons were killing Russian troops and vice versa,

because some of ours were over there too.

Quite a few.

And

people would be panicking, right?

Because at any minute,

we're all relying on somebody like like Putin being rational, which is already, you know,

I made that mistake in thinking that he would never invade Ukraine.

I thought that too.

And

so

what are we banking on the idea that if, you know, we, if we launch some kind of a weapon into the Russian territory, that they're not going to hit us?

What do you think?

I mean, I...

I think the people

who are prosecuting the conflict from our side.

I'm very familiar with their mindset because I knew a lot of these folks when I was in Russia.

It's kind of like all the

president's men.

These aren't very bright guys.

And things have gotten out of hand.

And

I think that

they have no idea what they're doing.

And this could easily get out of hand.

very, very quickly because they're messianic about this.

They think they must

continue this conflict.

Whereas the one thing that I thought Barack Obama was sensible about was like, you know, when the Crimea thing happened, he's like, look, it's not, you know, it's always going to be more important to them than it is to be.

Yes, that's right.

It's very important to them, by the way.

Right, exactly.

So I hear these people, including the U.S.

ambassador to Ukraine, but many others, just sort of blithely announced that, well, we're going to take Crimea.

And that.

Again, I don't have strong feelings about Crimea.

I've never been there, but I think I know as a factual matter that that is a trigger for nuclear war right there.

For sure, for sure.

And it, you know, it's kind of a jump ball also.

Like,

you know, should that place be, I think it is Russian at this point, but right, and it's been Russian historically.

I mean, there's a lot of weird stuff about Ukraine's history, like the, you know, the fact that they gave the, they created the territory as

sort of on a whim, you know, in the in the middle of the Soviet period.

Uh, the lines are very arbitrary.

They're not drawn along, you know, real linguistic or cultural lines.

And if you've been to the place, you'll find that

it's very Russian in some parts and very Ukrainian in others.

I'm sure that's changing now.

But the people who are pushing this,

they have no knowledge of that whatsoever.

It's the same thing as when I was in Russia.

They've been told one thing.

And so...

you know ukraine to them is like switzerland and we're saving it from russia whereas the reality is that

it's nothing like that in reality.

And I don't know.

How dangerous do you think they do you think they are?

I think they're crazy.

I think they're the most dangerous.

I think they're seized by hubris.

I think there is a messianic quality to this.

I think the entire leadership class of the country is

determined to commit suicide.

I think that they've boxed themselves in.

They're criminals.

They know that they will be exposed as such.

And they've also reached kind of the apogee of American Empire anyway.

It's all downhill from here.

I do think that they feel this.

And I think they want to extinguish this society.

And

that's such an incredibly dark thing to say.

I hesitate even to say it, but I don't see a rational explanation for any of this behavior at all.

I don't think it advances anyone's aims, including their own.

Right.

I don't believe that Larry Fink is like orchestrating all this so BlackRock can get even richer.

I think they want to get richer.

I think Larry Fink's a bad guy, obviously, but I don't think it's...

Or Lockheed Martin.

That's exactly right.

The defense contractors.

That's all true on one level, but that's not the explanation.

No.

No, it's way deeper than that.

I think this is a spiritual thing.

And I do think societies kill themselves just as people do.

And I think that's what we're seeing.

Clearly, that's what we're seeing.

I mean, tell me how that's not what we're seeing.

And I think that's just such an ugly idea.

Again, it hurts me to articulate it, but you asked.

So that's what I honestly think.

Well, I mean,

what other explanation is there?

Well, kind of, yeah.

Right.

I mean,

I've kind of run out of, I made the mistake, I think, for years of trying to think, well, what's the angle on this?

That's right.

That's how I thought.

You know, like there's got to be some end game that they're going for.

And the only way to make sense of this is to give that up, I think.

And because.

There's something darker going on in the culture of people who run this country that it's inaccessible if you're trying to like assign motives to it.

Right.

They could easily, like just take the problem with Donald Trump.

They could easily

defeat Donald Trump as a political entity if they just, if they were thinking as political consultants did in the 90s or 80s, right?

Like they would just make some subtle adjustments.

They would throw a bone to working people and

you know,

they would put it forward a candidate who isn't physically dead and they would win.

Right.

But no,

for them, I think it's a principle that a certain kind of voter not have a say in things.

And

that's just totally counterintuitive to me.

I just don't understand that, you know?

But.

So in other words, it's not just Trump.

It's the idea that the people who like Trump, those people might have power or be rewarded.

Right.

We cannot legitimize the negative feelings of those voters

is how they think.

Whereas

it's incredibly obvious if you go out in the campaign trail and talk to people who vote for Trump that they do it for a million different reasons, you know, ranging from, you know, the town that I live in used to be a booming economic center and now it's dead, right?

You know, it looks like

a third world country to there there isn't a functioning hospital within 300 miles of where i live the walmart is now the only place where you can buy anything for 50 miles like there's a million reasons um

and then there's some social issues too uh but once upon a time i mean i i remember not so long ago even bill clinton talking about trying to reclaim some of those working class voters and that was a like a legitimate

activity won West Virginia.

He won every county in West Virginia.

Imagine.

Every county.

That's amazing.

Every county in West Virginia in 1992.

And of course, I think he lost California.

Wow.

And so imagine a Democrat winning any county in West Virginia.

Well, they wouldn't want to win.

No, they don't.

Right?

That's totally true.

Right?

It's totally true.

I mean, they go in there with these scolding attitudes, like learn to code.

Like, what's wrong with you?

Like, there's this punitive attitude about it which is the

as you know if you've covered campaigns you cannot win if you if you if you have hostility towards the voters well that's trump's secret is he doesn't hate them he loves them i know i know right and that that was immediately apparent from his first campaign is that he he got up there and you know people say well what does a billionaire have in common with you know ordinary people well he he is like them in a lot of ways he has the same right he probably does the same thing in the spare time he goes to the same websites and we eat to the same restaurant we know that right exactly

and and you know so when he opens his mouth people think ah you know i can connect with this guy now

it's a lot of it is fake right and and the policy prescriptions may not make any sense but you can understand why but at the level at the at the you know at the level of viscera the like he's he is affection and they have hate and i think that's that's the thing that shocks me most like i i think i'm way too autistic or something to understand a lot of the things that are happening right now, but I think in terms of like, well, out, you know, outcomes.

And that's not what any of this is about.

And the thing that shocks me most is the actual hostility that people in D.C., where effectively I'm from, have for the rest of the country.

Like they hate the people in the country.

They do.

They don't just look down on them.

I thought it was just like looking down on them in a snobbish way.

Right.

No, it's like a hostility.

Right.

When they die, and you saw this during COVID.

Oh, he didn't get the vax.

Well, he died.

I'm glad he died.

Like, I'm glad he he died.

Right.

He's an American.

Right, right, right.

I'm not happy when a gang member dies in the south side of Chicago.

No, I'm serious.

I couldn't be more opposed to gang members south side of Chicago, but like, I don't know, it's like a, it's a human being.

It's an American.

Like, I think it's sad, actually.

Oh, I mean, the hostility during the COVID thing was also, it was unbelievable to watch.

Yeah, I mean, I mean, Jimmy Kimmel does this whole anti-vax Barbie thing where it's just,

you know, it's the worst kind of, you know, know cosmopolitan looking down at the at the at the hick kind of a thing and and they they hate these people right but why i i don't understand you know like

once upon again

not long ago entertainers wanted to connect yeah with ordinary people now they they don't like that audience they wouldn't want to get uh plaudits from that auditing audience um and politicians don't either they they they they want to be elected by the right people or

they want to do it without the help of the wrong kind of voters, but they can't because they're outnumbered.

So

it's a crazy time,

but I do think you're right that if you try to figure this out by assigning rational motives to any of this, it doesn't make any sense.

It won't work.

So we're on a slide, as you said at the very outset, into authoritarian government, certainly a different form of government, not a democratic government at all.

Some kind of oligarchy.

I'm already there.

Does that, is there any way to arrest that or slow it down?

Is it inevitable?

Like, what, if you could project,

what do you see?

Well, I mean, I don't think so.

Part of the reason that I'm so spun up about

a lot of this stuff that's happening is because I got to, I watched what happened when, you know, speech freedoms, even limited ones like the ones in Russia, they, they disappear, they don't come back, you know, like that's, that's kind of what happens.

And

they don't come back.

That is true, isn't it?

Right.

And, you know, in the United States,

there was a reverence once for

the First Amendment, for the whole Bill of Rights, that it just doesn't exist anymore.

There's this kind of like defeatist or unbelieving attitude about it.

And that's been another revelation of, you know, working on stories like the Twitter files is finding out that people don't really, they don't have the same feeling about the First Amendment that people did in the 80s and 90s or even the early 2000s.

I mean, even Rob Reiner does the American President, right?

And it's all about how,

you know, the ACLU and being allowed to burn the flag.

And

he's,

you know,

he's on the other side of this thing now, right?

Like, and so what happened to all those people?

What happened to that belief in

the system?

I mean, for all of them,

you mentioned that you and I came from probably from different political places at one point in time.

I think we probably both share a belief that America on some level worked.

right it had it had all kinds of flaws um but you know as immigrants came here from all over the world they built good lives and they chose to stay here i mean my family you know came from different parts of the world.

And

this, this country is screwed up.

I like the fact that it's screwed up, but it works.

This

system

has been a great thing.

And people don't believe that.

I think they've lost that belief, I think,

which is so sad.

I don't know.

Do you feel that?

I mean,

I feel it really strongly.

And I also feel that

any semblance of national unity or common belief, shared culture, even even shared language, but particularly the culture

is gone.

And I noticed it in talking to you because actually, you know, maybe you voted for one guy, voted for the other, but our core beliefs about the, you just articulated them right there.

I've never doubted that a day in my life.

Right.

I just didn't, you know, because like, yeah, America, yeah, screwed up in a lot of ways, of course.

First of all, it's huge.

So, of course, it's screwed up.

Everything big is screwed up.

Sure.

But

the best.

The system works.

And

I don't feel that there's a national consensus on that at all anymore.

And it seemed to have evaporated very, very fast.

And I'm not quite sure how.

Maybe that's the problem with being in your 50s.

Things change and you didn't see the change coming.

Yeah,

that's still a mystery, right?

Like where did that happen?

There had to have been a moment in time where...

Well, I'll tell you part of what happened is the people who were deputized to defend it refused to.

And Rick Stengels of the world, who was supposed to be, he was literally a guardian of the First Amendment.

He's the editor of Time Magazine.

Right.

And next thing you you know, he's a federal official working for Obama against the First Amendment.

And you're like, well, that's a dereliction of duty.

That's a major sin.

I think it's a crime.

I think you should be punished for that, actually.

You can't allow that.

I mean, if you're in a battle and the officers desert, they get shot for that.

They're not allowed to do that.

Like, you need leadership in order to preserve whatever it is that you have.

Right.

And so I blame the leaders 100%.

And without leadership, of course, things fall apart.

And no one's willing to stand up and be like, no,

you know,

the dignity of the average person is not just a good thing, it's the core of the enterprise.

It's essential.

You give that up, we're done.

And,

you know, you're not allowed to do this, period.

Yeah,

I agree.

And, you know, not now of

you know, the role, the role of the media,

I think, is an important one in American society.

We were given a very important responsibility to

tell the public when things aren't going right

and to do that

continually no matter what you know the which way the political winds are blowing to stick to that

and so now it's kind of more important than ever to to keep to keep doing that i mean you asked me like what how does this get turned around i don't know but the only thing i know is i think you know

you have to keep doing this stuff and telling people about it and in the hopes that it will get turned around.

So last question,

you spent 10 years within a society that punished journalists physically at times for telling the truth.

You're watching political figures go to jail.

And whatever you think of the charges or convictions or whatever, in every single case, you know for a dead certain fact, if that person hadn't been in politics on the wrong side, he would not be going to jail.

That's just a fact.

So they're using jail as a political instrument.

How long until that comes to journalists?

Like, do you worry that at this rate, like you wind up indicted?

I've started for the first time to worry about that.

You know, because

I spent so much time in Russia and I knew people who

physically suffered for what they did.

Right.

Whenever people talked about taking risks as a journalist in the United States, I always said, look, please, you know, like in other parts of the world, they actually go through hardship.

Yeah, try that in mexico yeah

exactly see what happens you know yeah um

you know but it's gotten weird here i mean even look even even the bannon story there's an element of that where

it may not be as much about

him as a political figure as it is about war room necessarily well it's 100 that right and no one wants to say it but at this point in his life as of today steve bannon is a journalist that's what he is and you may disagree with him completely he hosts a talk show every day.

Right.

It's like, what is that?

Right.

And the most influential one.

Yeah, I know.

Right.

And, you know, you hear people like Rick Wilson

getting up and saying, yeah, it's four months, but it's four important months.

It's where it's four key months.

He said, you know, like,

you know, the Republican strategist, he said that.

The Lincoln Project guy.

Yeah, the Lincoln Project guy, the former Dick Cheney aide.

You know, like, I, I, I

saw that and I was like, wow, they're kind of saying that out in the open, you know, and

even my experience, look, look, you had the FISA thing happen.

When I did the Twitter files, an IRS agent showed up in my house while I was testifying

to Congress.

So that's absolutely crazy.

Yeah, no,

I thought it had to be a coincidence, but I don't think I now no longer think it is.

And I do worry about it.

I mean, I haven't even shared this with my wife yet, but I thought it might be time for us to get another house in some other place that doesn't have an extradition treaty.

Yeah, well, there aren't many, you know, yeah, which is a problem.

All right.

I'm aware of that, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

And

I never had those thoughts even,

even a year ago, but you must have had them.

I've had some thoughts.

Yeah.

I've had some experiences that, you know, are pretty shocking, I would say.

Not interested in talking about it, but yeah, for sure, really, really shocking.

But it's still kind of all hard to believe.

I guess it's always that way, right?

When your society changes, it's hard to believe it's actually happening.

Well,

it's happened slowly.

Somewhere along the line, I became conscious of the fact that obviously somebody must be listening to,

you know, the people who I have in my contacts list, a lot of them are

out of the country or running from the law or on the wrong side of the intelligence services.

And,

you know, there's no way that somebody's not

aware of what's going on, you know, of what I do.

And that's, that's unnerving on one level.

But yes, this, this, this recent thing about, you know,

even the stuff involving the Epic Times and

Alex Jones, you know,

I was never a fan of his.

He had some choice things to say about me.

But I think this whole thing started with the decision to take him off

the internet.

And

that's troubling, you know?

Like they clearly see

journalists and information as a threat.

And

I don't think it's an accident that there aren't that many places left to publish.

And there aren't that many people left doing real journalism.

So yeah.

Do you think Twitter will stay open for the duration of the election?

Yeah,

it probably will.

But, you know, Trump's not on anymore.

I mean,

Trump's Twitter account is what won him, I think, the 2016 election.

And that was one of the reasons I think journalists hate him is because

he proved that they, in the internet age, you don't need reporters

if you're a politician.

And they couldn't stand that.

I mean, I listened to those conversations.

They were very resentful of the fact that

he didn't have to go through their approval system, you know.

But he's not on Twitter anymore.

And, you know,

I mean, it's extraordinary that Joe Biden's the only candidate in this election who hasn't been censored in some way.

RFK has been censored.

Ramaswamy's got, have been.

booted off LinkedIn for periods of time.

I mean, like Jill Stein, for that matter.

Jill Stein.

We found her in the Twitter file.

She was on a, on a list called is underscore Russian, which was Jill Stein?

Yes.

Yes.

Can they hear themselves?

I mean, can they, by the way, I like Jill Stein and know Jill Stein.

I'm not against Jill Stein.

Not voting for her, but like.

Right.

It's fine.

But if you find yourself thinking that Jill Stein,

Dr.

Jill Stein, is the threat to America, like you're a buffoon, too.

But

they think that, right?

I mean, they have the hostility towards Jill Stein

the same same way they had a hostility toward Ralph Nader once in the day.

And the difference is now,

if you're Jill Stein, they see you as part of the Trump

apparatus.

You're no different from Trump to them.

Assange, Jill Stein, you know, ISIS, whatever, they're all bumped together.

Yeah, yeah.

So Snowden, exactly.

Yeah.

So it's, it's, these are crazy times.

Is there anything you can get you to stop?

No.

I mean, I've got kids, so I'm obviously not completely invulnerable, right?

But

I think

the world, America needs journalists.

And again,

the first thing that we have to be is

tough about it.

Right.

And so you got to get knocked off before you give up.

I think

you shouldn't give up, right?

I mean, all my heroes in journalism didn't do that.

So I'm not going to do that, I don't think.

But I mean, you wouldn't, would you?

Under any circumstances.

Right.

Yeah.

Exactly.

That's how you be.

Thank you.

Thanks so much, Tucker.

I appreciate it.

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.