Matt Taibbi & The Rise And Fall Of American Media
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All right, boys and girls, we are back with another edition of the Ben Domenech podcast brought to you by Fox News. You can check out all of our podcasts at foxnewspodcast.com. Rate, review, and subscribe to this one and share it with a friend if you find it of interest. Today, I have a great conversation for you with Matt Taibbi.

He is an award-winning reporter and author. He hosts the America This Week podcast with novelist Walter Kern. I subscribe to it, and I hope that you will as well. And you can find his writing primarily at Racket News, which is at racket.news. It's a sub-stack that he's started and run for a while now. Matt is someone who has been through the journalistic gamut in so many different capacities, and

Rolling Stone, his work covering the financial crisis and the Fed, obviously his past work in Russia, which is something that I think some of you are probably familiar with. But then he was also someone who gained a lot of new prominence over the past couple of months, given his coverage of the Twitter files, one that allowed him access

access to all sorts of different material that was hidden behind the scenes in Twitter,

during the course of their decision-making processes around the 2016 election and the 2020 election that he has been able to roll out in front of audiences that, you know, I think are very much responding to the in-depth reporting that he's done. I think that Matt Taibbi is one of the most interesting writers and journalists working today, and I hope that you find our conversation of interest. Matt Taibbi, coming up next.

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Ryan Reynolds here for, I guess, my 100th Mint commercial. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I mean, honestly, when I started this, I thought I'd only have to do like four of these. I mean, it's unlimited premium wireless for $15 a month. How are there still people paying two or three times that much? I'm sorry.

I'm sorry, I shouldn't be victim blaming here. Give it a try at midmobile.com slash save whenever you're ready. $45 upfront payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three month plan only. Taxes and fees extra. Speeds lower above 40 gigabytes. See details. Matt Taibbi, thank you so much for taking the time to join me today. Thanks for having me. I want to ask you about a couple of things, but first off, I want to ask you this sort of overall question about your career. You have gone through...

I think one of the more interesting story arcs in terms of the people who love you and the people who hate you, of really any writer who I feel like I've been reading over the last 20 years. It's pretty amazing from the outside. How do you feel about it yourself? That's an interesting question. I actually have always believed that any reporter who...

imagines that they're going to have friends and keep them through their whole careers is probably either delusional or not planning on doing the job correctly. So, you know, I look at people who were either models or mentors of mine, you know, like Cy Hirsch. And, you know, I think about what happened with them.

I always believe that a primary characteristic of any reporter who's trying to do this job correctly is that there's a willingness to offend

your own audience and people within the business. Unfortunately, that usually has the consequence of getting you either fired or bounced out of the business. But a unique characteristic of the current media landscape is that you get to still have a career independently. And that's kind of a neat thing. So I don't worry about it too much. It was a little unsettling at points, but I think that's just how it goes, frankly. What seed of knowledge...

that you had do you do you credit for the fact that you were attuned uh much earlier even than skeptics on the right uh to the nature of the russiagate hoax um well i lived in russia for uh 11 years beginning in the early 90s i'm old enough to have gone to college in the soviet union

was in Russia when Vladimir Putin came to power. Putin actually closed down my old newspaper, The Exile. So I knew a fair amount about Russian politics. I had met people whom I knew were Russian intelligence in the course of my work and probably people who

Russian intelligence, but I wasn't aware of it. So I had a pretty fair idea of how they operate. And then just the story was so outlandish and so unlikely that

I thought it was absurd from the start and it also just didn't pass the smell test. I think early on when I was looking at the first reports about this, the first thing that struck me is that a lot of the sourcing was similar to the early WMD stories where there were a lot of anonymous official sources and we just couldn't check the work. It's like science if you can't reproduce the experiment in a lab.

You can't do the story and and then there was the thing that happened You know what when I published a couple of very mild articles about this sort of suggesting that people be careful There was this overwhelming condemnation and that was another red flag. So Yeah, I think all those things were factors, you know one of the things that I think that really exposed was how much Americans faith in the United States intelligence services

was especially on the right misplaced. That somehow because they didn't take the right lessons away from the WMD experience or because they were kind of insulated from it to varying degrees, they didn't have that kind of skepticism that's very healthy and needed. My question is, do you think that that's something that exists now

in a healthy way, meaning that there's actually going to be something that can be done about it? Or is this an, you know...

an incredible problem that's so overwhelming that you can't just actually go in there and reform the intelligence services in ways that actually have them do their jobs to the function that most US citizens would like to see them do? That's a great question. I think the, I definitely met people in the course of trying to unravel this story on the right who were conservative politicians and

who seem to me were having kind of a genuine come-to-Jesus moment about programs like the FISA Enhancement Act, about the tendency of the FBI to submit misleading answers even to congressional officials.

or in public. I think there were a lot of politicians who were genuinely surprised at the degree to which they were willing to dissemble and deceive in public. And that's been reflected in what seems to me a very aggressive and appropriate response by the Republican Party in trying to investigate some of these abuses, which is useful to contrast with

what happened after the Snowden disclosures and after WMD and after some of the WikiLeaks things that came out, the Democratic Party politicians made some noise about looking in those directions, but they never really followed through. So I think, yes, I think there is something to be done about it. There are mechanisms that you can use to fix these problems, and it looks like there are people who really want to try, so I'm hopeful.

I mean, to me, the FBI has so much, in particular, overstepped any kind of boundaries in terms of its behavior. You know, you look at the situation, you sort of say...

Looking back at the decisions that were made post 9-11 about the kind of collaborative methods, reforms, the creation of DHS and everything else that was allowed there, you know, it it certainly seems like something where.

this was used in a way that was never, you know, you know, certainly I'm sure there were some people who wanted it to work this way, but for your average conservative politician, that was not what they intended. You know, they, they certainly, they wanted to keep America safe. They were told that this was a way to keep America safe and they went down this path. How do you unspool that? You know, if, if you actually have a new administration in town that really wanted to

uh, you know, uh, wind back the clock and basically say, you know, Hey, we don't need to have these institutions so, uh, integrated to such a degree that they can kind of tell lies and then approve of other people's lies within the system in ways that the politicians are none the wiser to, unless they, uh, go like the, the deep dive, Chuck Grassley, you know, uh, Jim Jordan route and figure things out. Yeah. Um, it,

what's the way to do that? How do we unspool that in a way that's responsible? Well, first of all, I think you've got the chronology there. Correct. You know, after nine 11, I think there was a, uh, a widespread belief, not just among conservative politicians, but among a lot of, you know, sort of centrist Democrats who are the majority of Democrats now, uh, overwhelmingly that all of these agencies needed to be given, uh,

vastly enhanced powers, and they rolled back reforms that had been made that I think were very necessary after the church committee hearings in the 70s, including things like

requiring the FBI to have some kind of predicate before they investigate somebody. You know, once upon a time, the FBI actually had to have a reason and they had to be pursuing a case to be looking at you. And now the FBI is essentially a counterintelligence operation that is

spends a lot of its time and resources just gathering information about people, and the work doesn't go towards any kind of prosecution. That's completely new in American societies since the Hoover days. But yeah, so one of the things, you just mentioned politician naivete, and I think that that leads us to, you know, something that you had to confront personally, you know, in front of Congress, which is the level of naivete that they have about

The way that our intelligence services and our political class works hand in glove with big tech to do things that they would not be able to do themselves. Something that you have really exposed over the last decade.

You know, not just months, but years, I would say, in terms of your reporting, even before the Twitter files, it was something you were paying attention to. And I know that it's something that, you know, for a lot of Americans, it just kind of it seems like a just a sea of of unintelligible stuff getting thrown at them, you know, just like, oh, these big tech, they're doing bad things.

I have that general suspicion. How do you elucidate that in a way that even someone as dumb and naive as a member of Congress can understand? That's a great question. I love the way you put that. Um,

Yeah, it's tough, right? Because one of the things that you saw, even in that hearing with Schellenberger, Michael Schellenberger and me, and it's funny, if you go back and watch that performance, you can see that there are numerous moments where Michael and I kind of look at each other with smiles on our faces, almost like an astonishment, because as spectators, it was so amazing to watch

These people who had been elected to Congress who appeared not to know what was in the First Amendment, for instance. Things that should be fairly basic. But I think this is a consistent theme of what's happened in the last five to ten years. One of the first things that we found in the Twitter files was...

was an exchange between Vijay Gadi, who was essentially the executive running Twitter during the 2020 election, and the politician, the Democratic politician, Ro Khanna, who was trying to explain to her why it was bad for them to suppress the New York Post's Hunter Biden expose. And it was like she was hearing what

prior restraint and preemptive censorship for the first time. Those concepts had never entered her head. She didn't even know the parameters of that discussion. And I think that's increasingly common. There are people in Congress who

don't know that America historically does not have a harm standard for speech or that the existing law has a very high bar, incitement to imminent lawless action. They don't even know what the law is. So how do you argue with people who are coming from this place

where they don't know anything about America's traditions, which by the way, are deeply rooted in valuing freedom of speech, freedom of expression. It's the core idea of the whole American experiment and they don't know it. So it's terrifying. I think, you know, the thing that is really disturbing to me is that I remember I was, I was a, an aid on Capitol Hill briefly for about two years to Texas Senator John Cornyn back in the two thousands. And,

I was a speechwriter and and that overlapped with kind of the conversation that that Ted Stevens had about the internet being a series of tubes and And I know that it's like, you know, you know, RIP RIP Ted Stevens, by the way another guy who was completely Ramrodded by the the FBI side of things and only cleared, you know late but one of the things that that is

Funny to me is I feel like series of tubes is more accurate than what most of these current members of Congress Understand about the way the internet works probably true. Yes, and it makes me it makes me Infuriated but also I mean, you know, I I'm in my 40s You're a little older than me, but it's like at some point. I

Can't we shift to a generation of politicians who understand on a basic level how these things work and aren't stuck in the 1940s in terms of their understandings of technology? And how can you even begin to explain some of the things that you were just talking about?

in the internet context to someone who basically, you know, I know the difference in my own life between being an elder millennial who grew up without social media and my little sister who grew, you know, who was 10 years younger than me, who grew up

with social media and we're in the same generation. So I can't even imagine, you know, like have you had conversations with some of these politicians where you've walked them through what's going on, you know, uh, behind the scenes has, have they been receptive? Have they heard what you've and, and connected with you on, on these points or is it still kind of just like a blank face there? Well, I mean, I had exchanges with the Democrats only really in the public hearing, uh,

There was that one incredible moment where Sylvia Garcia...

the representative, I think she's from Texas, is the 29th. She was asking me about a Twitter file thread that I had posted that morning before the hearing. And it was abundantly clear in the exchange that she had no idea what Twitter was. She thought it was some kind of editorial body that I had submitted an article to for review.

And then you can see in the hearing that there's an aide who's leaning over to her and basically telling her, no, he just put something on there. They didn't review it. And that's kind of what we're dealing with is people who don't know even the basics of what it is to post something or what the difference is between a company that is actually –

giving a human review to material or just automatically uploading it. They don't know those differences. And so if you worked on the Hill, you know when there's a technical gap in knowledge, when there's a gap in technical knowledge,

members tend to defer to interests who can explain it to them. And the public doesn't have a lobby that's able to do that, really. So they rely very, very heavily on the companies to tell them what's up. And that's why this system has gotten, I think, very corrupted. So let's talk a little bit about the perspective that you have on media today. You are...

friends with, and you have, uh, very interesting conversations with Walter Kern who, uh, has, uh, you know, for his sins, I guess, uh, decided to launch a newspaper. How, how, how quaint. Um, I, but I also think that there's something interesting about that, which is to say we we're living through a period in which there's been an enormous amount of disruption in the media landscape.

I don't know what your opinions are or if you read the Ben Smith book or if you have any kind of thoughts on...

uh, you know, the landscape that we've kind of gone through. But I remember, you know, 10 years ago in 20, you look back to 2012 and Buzzfeed and the work that Andrew Kaczynski was doing for them, you know, that was assumed to be kind of the way of the future. These, you know, massive sites would get, you know, uh, they, they would make their, their money, you know, with cat picks and then they would sponsor, you know, these other things. Uh,

Now we're in a completely different landscape in so many ways, as you mentioned, that you have the ability to stand up something as an individual or as a group of individuals so much more easily than I think you could before. It's kind of a return in many ways to the the newsletter concept, which has been around forever and the and the.

basically a more powerful version of the blogging model. I'm just curious what your perspective is on the most interesting trends when it comes to online writing because you've been part of it at kind of every iteration of its existence in one way or another. I love that question. I love this topic. I think about it a lot. Walter's newspaper is very interesting to me. He and I both belong to, I think, a dying breed in the business of

which involves people who were involved with journalism back when you needed to know more than just creating the content and hitting send.

I came into the business by way of alternative newspapers and I had to physically do every part of the operation from design to making those old plates that they use to run off the newspapers at the printing press to in some cases physically distributing papers. I had my own distribution room.

with a pickup truck that I used to do. You've seen Liberty Valance. Founder, editor, publisher, and I also sweep up the place. Exactly, which by the way is the, you know, that's the model that American media had for a long time. It was like a working class thing for ages where the printer was really also the journalist for a long time. Can I interrupt for just a second? You just said something key, which is

Working class. And the thing that seems to me to have been changed, and I don't know exactly the point that you would select to change it, but being a journalist, being a reporter, was a working class profession.

for a very, very long time here in America. And at some point it became this elite sort of, you know, place for people to flow into. And I just, I think that that had profound and negative effects on the way that the work is done. I don't know if you agree, but it just... Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. There's a great line or great passage in Michael Herr's book called

Walter Winchell, or I think it's just called Winchell, uh, where he's describing the famous radio broadcaster, Walter Winchell. And this is back in the thirties or forties or whenever it was when being a journalist was not an honorable profession for, uh,

a person of the upper class and somebody asks him if he's in the media and he says, yeah, but don't tell anybody. My mother still thinks I'm a piano player in a whorehouse. And that was kind of how people thought of journalists. Once upon a time, they were, uh,

you know, somewhere around the level of like a plumber, you know, the people who worked in the profession were not upscale rich people. That was just not the case for a long time. And then I think there was a big change,

and this comes from me personally observing because my father went into the business when it was still relatively a middle class to working class profession and then he watched these changes. It became, I think, sexy after all the president's men and then a lot of kids who were more like me who went to upscale liberal arts schools started to flow into the business and then by the time I came in,

it was almost exclusively Ivy league grads and people of that ilk. Uh, and the problem as you identify, uh, is that,

These people are the same people they're supposed to be covering. Socially, they come from the same set. They do not have this natural anti-establishment bent that used to be built into the business. You know what else they have? And this is the thing that just sticks out to me. They have the same agents. Oh.

Well, that's true. Yes. One of the things that Ethan Strauss is so good about pointing out is that often an NBA player will have the same representative or a representative in the same house as the ESPN personality who's assigned to be covering them. That creates problems. That's not a good thing. It sure does. And then think about all the bizarre ethical machinations that could be going on

you know, reporter X is writing a book about Senator Y and Senator Y wants to publish a book with that same label. It starts to get weird really fast.

And that's even before you get into the social ramifications. I mean, I went to, uh, I was at the UTA, uh, white house correspondence dinner party. I don't go to the dinner cause I hate it. And I wish that it would disappear. Um, uh, but the, the,

That is, you know, just sort of it's Doug Emhoff talking to the entire crew from CNN, talking to, you know, this person from Fox and this person from MSNBC. And then you turn on the TV and you see, you know, five different ex-FBI or CIA or DOJ people, you know, all on camera together alongside someone who's also, you know, represented by them as the host.

represented by the same agency as the host. And it's like, wait a minute. I mean, come on. This is taking incest to new levels. It's just, I find it to be really a problem. And it's one of the reasons why I think

journalism has really suffered so much in America, uh, is because, you know, in a, alongside kind of the social media landscape, uh, the ad landscape, you know, leaving local, uh, media to die in a ditch, you know, you end up with these people who basically go straight from Harvard, straight from Princeton to working for, you know, the, uh, New York times and the Washington post. And, uh,

And they don't ever have that experience of, you know, trying to buttonhole a state rep, you know, in a situation where they need an answer for something on a story. And that leaves all those stories to be picked up by these entities online that have, I think, a lot of hardworking people, but also don't necessarily have potential.

the trust level that some of these other big places do. Yeah, and...

Also, they've created a kind of new revolving door, right, where people go from Harvard to the New York Times and then maybe from the New York Times to becoming aides on the Hill. And then maybe from that, they go into the intelligence services or vice versa. Certainly, the other route is now well established where people, you know, go to work in cities.

or law enforcement, and now they're pouring into media in enormous numbers and replacing and supplanting jobs that once belonged to journalists. Now, why is that a problem? I mean, I think...

You would think it would be obvious. People who work in intelligence, they are trained to deceive. That is their entire modus operandi. And they do it many times for patriotic reasons or what they think are patriotic reasons. But they don't have any conception of...

going for the truth no matter who it hurts. That's not their objective. Also, the other thing, just quickly about that, is the media...

derives all of its power from the perception of separateness from everything else. Like, in order to be scary, the press has to be this unruly, ungoverned thing that exists outside of government and, you know, throws a scare into politicians. And they can't be that if there's this web of interlocking relationships. And that's the thing that really troubles me just on the level of...

people not understanding where their influence comes. You lose your influence once people perceive you to be sitting in the lap of Congress or the White House or whatever it is. Why would you bother listening to a journalist in that case? Yeah, I mean, they might as well walk around like a NASCAR driver with Northrop Grumman right across their chest. Exactly, yeah. So just one more question on the media landscape thing.

We've seen you and I have kind of seen the departure, sadly, you know, sometimes via death, sometimes via the nature of the industry of a lot of contrarian voices. It feels like there used to be, I felt like the section of the media landscape was.

where you didn't necessarily know what they were going to say about something. You didn't necessarily know what position they would take on the news of the day. Obviously, Christopher Hitchens was one of these, but I would actually argue that Andrew Breitbart was one of them, too. It's somebody who would often zig where you might expect them to zag. And it makes me depressed to see the kind of landscape that

that has, I feel like, very completely predictable people and headlines. You know what they're going to say before you click on the piece. And it's very rare that you have somebody who has some kind of contrarian bent to it. I would talk about this as a problem that is...

That is symbolized by the Atlantic and its descent into what it has become. But but I feel like I mean, it's obviously bigger than them, but I just think that they that there was a place where you used to have interesting ideas. And now that's it's one in a million. What can be done to reinject that?

some contrarian ethos, some, you know, some motivation to flip off the entire Bill Maher audience, you know, to, to the way that people are approaching their jobs in media today, because it seems like something very important is lost if we don't have that. Well, first of all,

on the Atlantic, I would rather have my teeth pulled out one by one than voluntarily read that publication from beginning to end. It is so terrible. It's so bad. It's astonishing. You know, like it,

I view the last interesting thing they did was that cover story that got him canceled by Jesse Single. You know, like whatever that was five years ago, four or five years ago. And it's just been downhill ever since that.

Anyway, but continue. Yeah, I mean, it's funny. You mentioned my co-host Walter Hearn, right? Not long ago, he was the editor at Spy Magazine. And once upon a time, Spy Magazine was emblematic of what people thought of magazine writers, which is that

secretly they're very witty people who have very funny observations that they would love to share with you you know if they only got the chance and

And that is not true anymore. The people who work in media are just not funny people anymore. They have no sense of humor and it comes through in the absolutely unreadable prose that they crank out in enormous volumes. I think The Atlantic is the kind of supreme example of just unreadable.

unreadability in media now. But the predictability thing you talk about is a problem. I think its roots begin with the financial shape of the business where most organizations make their money by identifying a demographic and just kind of feeding it stuff that they know that the

readers and audiences will like. So there's a penalty that you pay for being surprising, which they're not willing to pay. I think that's actually a little misguided that you need to kind of be a little bit unpredictable in order to keep the respect of your own audiences, but also to keep your own respect, right? Yeah.

That's what makes media interesting or should make media interesting. It's funny, and not to go on about this, but for a very brief period of time I worked in the organization that became The Intercept. At the time I was supposed to be at First Look Media working to create a satirical site. And

I had arguments about the, the Buzzfeed phenomenon you talked about wherever the hot takes, where everybody thought it could be automated and that things like upworthy were the secret to media. Uh,

because algorithms would be able to identify what people like the most and then we could just crank it out. And I argued that, no, actually what's going to be important in the future is that there's going to be so much automated crap that being identifiably human is what's going to have value. Yes. And that in order to do that, a key thing is to be funny, to be different,

and be unpredictable and they totally rejected that idea and that's one of the reasons why I never worked there but uh but I still I still think that's true your your uh inspiring defense of humanity was graded on us as a d minus on the a on the algorithmic scale um so the the

The thing that I find so disturbing about this is that it just is not... It's not conducive to have a situation where...

All of our different columnists and editorial people are basically speaking from the same sheet over and over and over again. This is the column that you have written 500 times. And I do not mean that to be a slight against my friend George Will, but it is one of these things where I think that, you know, there's just so much repetitiveness in

to this that you don't really get something new. But then also, I think that that problem is creeped over into the other areas of media, where you just have basically 12 people at 12 different sites writing the same piece, you know, based off of often the same piece of misinformation that they're, you know, using to kind of hook things to. And

The thing that I find sort of disturbing about this is that I don't see the level of interest and investment in creating actual journalism that we ought to see. And Substack's great. I know you love Substack. I love Substack. We all love the ability to sort of be able to monetize our work. But there has to be something bigger than this. You can't just have a situation where

the New York Times, the Washington Post, and all of these legacy media institutions are churning out the same sort of misinformation over and over again on a daily basis. And there isn't something that rises up and challenges that on a greater scale on the, you know, with the capacity to produce, you know, feature pieces that have, you know, three bylines and, you know, the investment of, you know, years of work and labor. And obviously, you know,

This is going to be on Fox. As a Fox contributor, I love the work that we do.

But very few people ever point out that we're just one place. There's a limitation to this. We need something more. Is there a capability to turn Substack or to turn the various entities that have been grown up by you, by Michael, and by others into something that has a little bit more scale to it?

Yeah, I've believed that if somebody with a lot of money were to come along and create something...

you know that i i called like neither side news or um you know with some kind of wide-scale effort to try to create a new sort of news model that was more fact-based and less ideological i think it would do well the problem is the formula is a little elusive right now um it

how do you monetize it? I'm not really sure that that's a mystery that nobody solved. Substack hasn't solved it. Um, when I worked at Rolling Stone, you know, back kind of in one of its heydays, uh,

they would tell me, Hey, go out and investigate this for nine weeks and then come back with 6,000 words. And who can afford to do that? Now you have to be creating content constantly, uh, in order to pay for it. Right. You anticipated my next question. So I, um,

When I went to college in 1999, I wanted to be a writer for National Geographic. I wanted to be one of the... Wow, that's what I wanted to be when I was a kid. That's interesting. Yeah, I wanted to be the guy who they send to a place for three, four months and figures everything out about that place and comes back and writes 8,000 words and that's the thing. And then I do the next place, you know, and...

That's what my dream was. That job doesn't exist. Or at least if it does, I'm unfamiliar with it. And like so many people in my age range, 9-11 sort of disrupted a lot of things and changed paths and that kind of stuff. You were at Rolling Stone during one of its heydays. I'm so jealous of that. I just think it's an incredibly cool thing.

And I mean that really. Like, it really was cool. People should go back and read it and actually appreciate it for what it was. Is there any way to get back to that? Is there any way to restore that? I mean, do we just have to find some, you know, ludicrous billionaire who wants to do something very silly and lose a lot of money? Is that the only way? I don't know. I just think it might be...

be something that involves new forms of media. Maybe it's more documentary style stuff. There's a lot of documentary work that's going on right now. I think it's really interesting. I'm not sure how it makes money because that's not the space that I operate in. But you're absolutely right. The type of work that you were talking about, which I did for 15, 20 years...

That person doesn't really exist in media now. Journalists are, generally speaking, they're like professional test crammers, right? We enter a subject, we don't know anything, and then we're supposed to emerge at the end more or less experts on how things work. And you can do that overnight if it's a simple story, if there's only three or four people

you know, points of fact that you have to master in order to do the story. But there's no way anybody can go in and learn, for instance, how the Pentagon budget is constructed in 24 hours. It takes much longer than that, right? So in the absence of that kind of...

system, we're going to have all sorts of topics that are not going to be in popular media. How does the Fed work? How does money creation work? Does anybody know? Most people don't. And that's the major, major problem is that you're creating audiences who have no knowledge base. Just to express the level of laziness that some of these folks have, I wrote

a magazine profile for the spectator of Mark Wayne Mullen, the senator from Oklahoma, who's an interesting character for a number of reasons. But he hadn't had kind of any kind of... I'm not really into the politician profile, but no one had profiled him. No one on the national level had done it. And I went down to where he lives in Stilwell, Oklahoma, which is one of the poorest counties in the entire United States.

And when I went down there, it was just very funny because, you know, the

they were like, well, you know, all the journalist needs to do is to like come here. And it was like, no, no, none of them have come here. So it's like, and so you spend two days there and you go to the, you know, the, uh, the strawberry festival and the late night rodeo. And you meet all these people who are on welfare, but are like super patriotic. And, uh, and you end up with like,

Why wouldn't someone do this? Just do the work of actually going to the place and learning about the people and talking to them. It's amazing to me how many people won't even pick up a phone. They just look at what's on Twitter and they go from that. Yeah, there was a story. I forget who the columnist was. I believe it was somebody at Vox who talked about...

hating the telephone uh and i thought what journalist admits they hate the telephone it's how you do your job exactly i i was shocked by that it was it was very strange and then you know you talk about not showing up in person i was just at the the hearing yes i want to ask you about this the new orleans hearing uh related to so

Just give our listeners a little bit of a thumbnail about this case and why you were going down there to watch what would happen. So this is the Missouri v. Biden Internet censorship lawsuit. It has a whole slate of defendants who are being accused of pressuring Internet companies into censoring content in violation of the First Amendment. And.

And on July 4th, there was an injunction or there was an order by the judge in this case, basically barring almost every agency in the government from having contact with social media companies. Now, the Biden administration immediately stayed that order, but...

If it were to be restored, which is likely what's going to happen in the future, it would be one of the biggest and most influential legal cases we've had probably since the turnover of Roe v. Wade. But it's on the order of that, right? And I went to this hearing because there was oral arguments about whether or not that stay should remain in place. And there were three journalists there. One was from...

Three. Yeah. One was from Missouri. One was from Louisiana because those were the two plaintiff states in the case. No national media. Oh, my God. Right? And this is, as you point out, there are lots of things that you catch in person that you can't catch from transcripts, from other things. I mean, little details like the fact that the government only sent one lawyer there while the plaintiffs had like, you know, 10, right?

That's important. It tells you a lot, right? And you got to see Don Willett in action. Right, yeah, exactly. He was funny. But see, that's a perfect example.

they're sending more people to cover women's soccer than they are to cover this. And it's like nothing against women's soccer, but it's just like there is more of an investment in covering things that are actually very unimportant in the scheme of things versus something like this. The

the ramifications of this case could be enormous. Um, you know, what, what do you think, what is your feeling having been in the room and observed, uh,

the interactions between the government lawyers and lawyer, I should say, and the judges about where this is headed. Well, in that particular hearing, it was very clear. This was an appellate court, so it was a three-judge panel. All three judges were very specific

spun up about internet censorship could not stop pestering the government's lawyer about it. That might not be the case in a different court, although I would think the current Supreme Court would be, you know, pretty favorably disposed to the plaintiffs. I would contrast it to, I once covered a hearing that also involved oral arguments in a drone case where the

the government was arguing that it had the right to keep everything about the drone program secret. And you could tell from the questioning that the judges were going to rule for, in favor of the federal government, that there was not going to be any information released, and that's just the way it was. Here, the vibe was opposite. The judges were mad at the government lawyer, or at least gave some indication that they didn't like the position. And also, the government...

lawyer seem very halting and not confident in the arguments, which is, you know, as you've covered court cases, right? That's a dead end. Yes, I actually successfully countersued the government in an NLRB case. Wow, okay, there you go. So the thing that is so important to me that people take away from this is

There has to be some kind of ramification for the things that our government has been doing over the past several years when it comes to their censoring of COVID information, when it comes to their censoring of the New York Post, when it comes to any of the different steps that they've been taking interacting with these social media companies. And I fear that we're going to be in a situation where just like

the rest of the media has escaped any kind of ramifications, any kind of judgment, you know, looking at themselves in the mirror over the mistakes that they have made, some intentional, some not, over the past several years, that our government is going to be able to do the same thing and basically get away with everything scot-free, not have anybody even get a slap on the wrist,

Is that, do you think, the likeliest, you know, ultimate sort of scenario here? Or do you think that there's something that could be achieved that could actually make sure that this doesn't happen again in the future?

That's a really good question. I think the likelihood that somebody is somehow concretely punished for what happened, that doesn't feel terribly likely to me, although there might be lawsuits where there are consequences where they're, you know, financially for some of these actors. But I do think that it's very possible that there could be

sweeping reforms that would be designed to reinvigorate the First Amendment and give it some presence in this conversation. There have been so many things that have gone on since 9-11 in particular that have really undermined civil liberties and moved a lot of what goes on in America into this secret kind of

second governmental system that the public doesn't have access to. I do think that they can do some things to change that, but it's going to take a lot of work and probably a lot of success by the right politicians for that to happen.

Do we need a new ACLU? Oh, yeah, absolutely. Although I think we already have something along that lines in FIRE, which is the foundation for...

Yeah, they changed the meaning. They didn't change the acronym, but they changed the words in the acronym. You're looking it up right now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Foundation for... Individual rights? Foundation for individual rights and expression. Expression. Expression. Expression was eluding me. I apologize for not knowing that. I always used to get some of these acronyms confused, but...

Nico Perino, who's there, has really, I think, stepped into the role of the

old ACLU, they did a fantastic documentary about Ira Glasser, who was the ACLU head when they defended the right of Nazis to march in Skokie, Illinois. And I think FIRE, although they may be coming at the topic from a slightly more libertarian point of view than the old ACLU did, their basic conception of what

civil liberties are and why they need to protect it is almost identical, I think, to what the old ACLU thought. So they're going to step into that role.

What happened to the actual ACLU is just mind-boggling. It's bonkers. It's sad to me. I worked with them on so many stories over the years, and this change to me is so disheartening. I had described myself as an ACLU conservative back in the 2000s because I thought of myself as being very much aligned with their...

civil libertarian approach but i also i just can't even i can't believe what they've become it's just very depressing um you along with uh uh someone like bill maher is one of these few people i think in media who is viewed as being you stayed in the same place while the world moved around you

um, the galaxy rotated. Uh, and so you end up in a position where, uh, people who are from the right of center are more interested in interviewing you. Is that a weird experience personally? How do you feel about it? It's a little weird. Um, and you know, there were, there was a time in my life where I probably would have been extremely nervous about it. Uh, I, I didn't give interviews to Fox for a long time. Um, and, um,

you know that going back I think my reasoning on that was a little bit flawed but even so you know I I think differently about these things now the things change people have you know they

change their political orientation based on events that take place. And if you are sticking to kind of a principles-based view of the world where you're looking more at the long view as opposed to the urgent sort of partisan situation in front of you, you're going to end up clashing with people who are your friends.

you know, with, with Donald Trump, I was not a fan of Donald Trump. I'm still not exactly a fan of Donald Trump. Um, I was very critical of him in 2016. Uh, but you know, when things started to happen, like, you know, the raid on his lawyer's office, I remember I got a call from a friend who, who's like a black drug dealer. Uh,

And he told me, he's like, if they can do that to him, what are they going to do to my lawyer? So you got a call from your drug dealer. You can put it that way too. The thing that is so weird to me about it is that I've been –

you know, sort of a libertarian conservative populist type, you know, for, for quite a long time. And I think that, you know, I, I really, I mean, I've been very public in my criticism of, of Trump, but I also think that,

there's a point where a system becomes so broken that something comes along, whether it's a person or a movement that kind of cracks things open for the, the broader public to see how upset the system is and how wrong it is in so many ways. And I think that he definitely had that effect, which is something that I think of as a positive, because I think unless you, unless you have that kind of chemotherapy, you're never going to start to, you know, uh, improve. Um,

But anyway, just with the time that we have left, I have to ask you, is there anyone that you know who's rich enough to just buy Rolling Stone and give it to you? No, sadly. Although...

Elon won't do that for you. It'd be a lot cheaper than Twitter. Yeah. It would be funny. He did offer, didn't he offer to buy the New York times the other day? Um, that was funny. I did think that was funny, but I approve. I don't know what you, what is, what is your opinion of Elon? You've, you've, I'm certain, I'm certain had more interaction with him than any average American. Well, it got weird at the end with him. Um, you

I'm not going to lie. The sub stack thing? Very bad. I don't get it. This is tiny. You don't need to squish it. I think he's sincere about a lot of this stuff. I also think that, you know,

Like a lot of people who are very, very successful, they can be volcanic and mercurial. There's not a whole lot you can do. Do things on a whim. Yeah, exactly. I personally, as someone who wants crazier billionaires just in general for the entertainment sake, I'm in favor of what he does because I like more billionaires who have Zeppelins and things like that. Oh, yeah.

I mean, just like the Twitter files, I mean, to share an anecdote that I haven't really told anybody yet, but there was a moment in the first meeting where he's kind of like leaning back in the chair and there was an executive in the room and he was saying like,

Yeah, you know, just grab a desk somewhere and you can look at anything. And the executive's like, do you mean even privilege stuff? And he's like, yeah, you know. And I could see, you know, everybody in the room like going through various stages of congestive heart failure at the moment. And I was trying not to say anything, but, you know, that...

to do that is you need, you need more rich people who are willing to be nuts a little bit. Let's get nuts. Um, so, uh, so last question for you, you,

are someone who, you know, in addition to being, you know, a great writer and a great reporter, you're also someone who's very, you know, well-read. I'm curious as to sort of what you turn to in your own time for reading in this particularly chaotic moment in American history to sort of

ground yourself or to make sure that you're still like staying connected with something outside of this humdrum and ridiculous news cycle. What do you turn to? Well, Walter and I started doing a thing where we read

Yes.

which is a great book. Al Gore's favorite book, by the way. Is it really? Oh, no. Yes, he gave that as an answer to a 2000 quiz or something about what his favorite book was. Oh, man, you just ruined it for me, but it is a great book. No, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. It was actually, from my perspective, an expression of how

nerdy he actually is that he would say that it's his favorite book. Ow. Why didn't you just say the firm or something? Right.

I'm pretty sure he didn't get the humor in that book. That's a incredibly funny book, among other things. But anyway, yeah. Anything that's kind of old and has some depth to it, I go back and read now. And I've got kids, so I try to get introduced into that stuff, too. A lot of poetry. I'm reading a lot more poetry than I used to. Oh, really? Do you have a favorite...

current or older poet i love archibald mccleesh auden um a houseman i mean i don't know i like among other things i like poems that rhyme uh which is i'm not afraid to say if i if i can uh recommend uh uh a stallings uh work uh if you have not if you've not read her she's a um

She's an American based in Greece, and she does a lot of stuff that has sort of that influence through things. But it's really, really wonderful. Her collection, Olives, is very good. And so a particular favorite, if you have kids, is Fairytale Logic.

which you can find. But anyway. All right, Matt, thank you so much for taking the time to join me today. Really a pleasure. Thanks so much, Ben. Take care. More of the Ben Domenech podcast right after this. This podcast is supported by FX's English Teacher, a new comedy from executive producers of What We Do in the Shadows and Baskets. English Teacher follows Evan, a teacher in Austin, Texas, who's been a teacher for a long time.

who learns if it's really possible to be your full self at your job, while often finding himself at the intersection of the personal, professional, and political aspects of working at a high school. FX's English Teacher premieres September 2nd on FX. Stream on Hulu. So I just wanted to give you a brief insight on my perspective on what's going on within the Democratic ranks after the naming of David Weiss to be a special counsel candidate.

into the Hunter Biden affair. Obviously, there's been some great writing done on this from a number of different sources who are typically guests on our show. Andy McCarthy has a good piece at National Review. Jonathan Turley has a good piece about it as well at The Messenger. And I think that

you know, their tendency, which is to sort of say that this is an attempt to kind of shove everything under the rug, pretend like this is an ongoing investigation and prevent the president from having to answer deep questions about the Hunter Biden affair in lots of different circumstances. And certainly, you know, legally, you know, we'll have to see how these play out. You know, it seems to me that they have the right of it, that basically this is a way to prevent

this issue from being one where there is a considerable ability on the part of Congress and of other investigators to dig into it because it's part of an ongoing investigation involving a special counsel, et cetera, et cetera. One who already brokered a deal that was viewed as sweetheart by everybody under the sun who isn't a Democrat partisan. But I think there's another way to view this, which is that when you name a special counsel to look into someone,

Regardless of the outcome of their investigation, that naming in and of itself is a very negative sounding act from the perspective of your average voter. So I do think that to the extent that this is something that is designed to hide the ball internally in D.C.,

It's also something that I think is going to be a negative for the president when he's running for reelection. He's going to continue to get questions about it in every circumstance. He's going to get questions about it on the debate stage eventually, assuming that he and the nominee of the Republican Party do end up debating. We'll see if he tries to dodge that. But the truth is that the president, I think,

Even if, you know, he was trying to, you know, avoid this, even if his allies were trying to avoid this in terms of of this naming of special counsel who had who had already shown himself to be very amenable to doing whatever the Biden family wanted him to do.

I think that this is something that is a step further in a way that will prove to be a negative politically and something that will just reinforce the idea that there is something there, something there to be discovered, something there to be discussed and something there to be investigated. And that's something that I think, frankly, hurts the current president.

It's not something that's going to drive him from office, obviously. It's not something that's going to keep him from running for re-election in all likelihood. But it is something that I think is kind of an indication that Democrats are not happy about what's going on here. And even the allies...

of the president who have done their level best to try to play hide the ball on this are very sick and tired of having to deal with the headache that is Hunter Biden and is all the different new revelations that have come out on a weekly basis practically since the president's election. I'm Ben Dominich. You've been listening to another edition of the Ben Dominich podcast. We'll be back soon with more to dive back into the fray.

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