Guest: Matt Taibbi - Censorship to Vindication: Stories From The Front Lines of The Info Wars

Music. An idea whose time has come cannot be destroyed by armies or governments.

It's too pervasive, and we still have tools to spread the message. Music. Welcome to the Free Thought Project Podcast, a hub for free-thinking conversations about the promotion of liberty and the daunting task of government accountability. Here are your hosts, Jason Bassler and Matt Agarist.

Hello again free thinkers welcome back to the free thought project podcast my name is jason bassler and joining me is the free thought project editor-in-chief matt agorist well guys today is a very special day and a special podcast why you ask well not only do we have an amazing guest joining us on the show today but we're also celebrating a birthday that's right it's mr agorist's birthday today now because we do have an important guest on the show we'll be skipping

our usual announcements but first and foremost i did want to ask the birthday boy how he's feeling today so uh matt happy birthday dude and uh how's your birthday going so far dude it's exciting man i've been wanting to talk to matt for a long time now and it just so happened that the pod we moved the podcast to tuesday and hey that's my birthday so it's awesome be a great one indeed man yeah i'm definitely looking forward to it but before i do introduce

our guest i did want to remind everybody just really quickly that we had a powerful conversation last week with economics expert historian and gold guru tony arterburn and uh you know tony always has a way to cut through the noise with his analysis. And provide some timely insights into crypto the economy and of course precious metals we discussed the CBDC bait and switch, Trump's new tariff trade war, and how the debt continues to rise.

And we even ended the conversation on an optimistic note. So guys, definitely download and listen to that episode after you finish with this one. And as always, freethinkers, please subscribe, rate and review this podcast. It does really help us get this podcast into more people's ears.

All right. Well, as I mentioned, it's a very special day for us today here at the Free Thought Project, not only because it's Matt's birthday, but because we've been looking forward to this conversation for a few years now. But that's only because our guest today is a very busy man and a well-known journalist. He started his career in journalism in the early 90s, reporting for the Moscow Times.

Upon his return back to the States, he began covering politics for Rolling Stone magazine in 2004, where he wrote for years. He's also the author of several acclaimed books, including Grifftopia, Hate Inc., and Insane Clown President. And I love that title, by the way. He's been recognized with awards from National Magazine and the Sydney Award. And in recent years, he's shifted to self-publishing through his own Substack newsletter entitled Racket News.

Of course, he was a key figure in the release of the Twitter files in 2022 after Elon Musk bought Twitter and handed him and other journalists what's been dubbed as the Twitter files from the previous Twitter regime.

Our guest today is none other than the great Matt Taibbi. So Matt, thanks for joining us and welcome to the Freethought Project podcast. Well, thanks for having me, Jason. I really appreciate that. That's a very kind introduction. Thank you very much. And it's good to talk to you again. It's been a while. It has been a while, man. And yeah, we've been looking forward to this for years now, and for good reason, man. We have a lot to talk about today.

But first, I wanted to start by talking about our story, because art history, you know, goes back, what, nearly like seven years now to when you reached out to me for an interview about an article for Rolling Stone relating to Facebook censorship. Now, I'm sure most of our audience knows this because I've mentioned it quite a few times over the years. But back in October 2018, both Facebook and Twitter deleted our pages and accounts on the same day within hours of each other.

And it resulted in a net loss of nearly six million fans. It's been come to known as the purge. It was certainly a devastating day for the Freethaw Project and other publishers and accounts. And it did really kind of effectively kill our operation. But Matt, you were watching the situation closely. You had your finger on the pulse regarding the bigger picture, how Facebook was just beginning to roll out its censorship campaign against publishers.

Around that time, the fact-checking programs had just begun as well, kind of creating a different social media experience than we had prior to that.

And it was clear a shift was happening. and you were kind enough to cover our story and our situation in the article and you even put a picture of me in rolling stone which of course was bittersweet because as a musician in my younger years you know being in rolling stone magazine was like a dream come true but it was also a very devastating depressing time kind of highly highlighting this fucked up situation and clear collusion between

social media companies to ban speech and users that they didn't like Now, with all that said, you know, Rolling Stone was the only mainstream publication at the time that covered our story. And, you know, it meant a lot to us. It still does. The story was a while ago, of course, you know, what, seven years ago. But I am compelled to hear your story as to, you know, why you chose to cover this.

And, you know, what was your impetus to covering our story? Well, you reference that being a difficult time for you. I have to say that this was actually covering your story coincided with kind of a difficult time for me as well, because it was really the beginning of the end of my career in mainstream press, really over this issue. And, you know, you ask why I covered this. The better question would be, why didn't everybody cover this?

You know, what happened was, you know, obviously over the summer of, I think that was 2018, right? When that happened. So, you know, Alex Jones was removed from four different companies in what would, you know, clearly look like a coordinated situation. But Alex Jones is an unsympathetic figure. Most people in mainstream press can't stand them. And so nobody really cared about the speech implications of that incident.

I know I wrote about it kind of halfheartedly, but then there were these little stories that appeared and they got almost no play at all about Facebook teaming up with the Atlantic Council to get rid of what they call coordinated and authentic activity. You know, you're obviously familiar with what that whole thing was. But as an outsider, I had no idea what was going on.

And it took like a couple of days after I saw those stories appear to, you know, work through the chronology, which was that the heads of these companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google had all been hauled before up to the hill.

And kind of in exchange for a relaxation of a threat of increased regulation, they had to agree to start partnering with these groups that the Senate recommended that they work with, one of them being the Atlantic Council and specifically this thing that they later called the Digital Forensic Research Labs. And so you put that together with the fact that you suddenly have 800 sites.

That were being deleted. And one of the reasons I was calling you was to try to was to try to determine were these sites real or, you know, were they like spam or what was the deal? Once it turned out to be that these were pretty, you know, sites like yours were pretty significant independent media operations, you know, the media equivalent of like a mom and pop or, you know, not even a mom and pop store, but like a legitimate small business.

And they were just being destroyed willy nilly overnight. And the shock for me was that nobody in media cared at all. In fact, if you go look at that story, it's called Who Will Fix Facebook? And that's because the editors were afraid to look like they were being too sympathetic to the deleted material. At the time, it was in vogue to be more in favor of cracking down on misinformation, disinformation.

So I was so disillusioned by that whole thing that, yeah, I mean, I don't know what to say except that your story, I thought, was just awful. And to see journalists not sticking up for other journalists was amazing to me. Yeah, right. Amazing in all the wrong ways. And I totally agree. You know, I felt kind of the same sentiment after it happened. Like, where are these media requests? I mean, I think we did InfoWars,

you know, speaking of Alex Jones. I think we did InfoWars. We did a few other small libertarian podcasts. And then, as I just mentioned, you know, Rolling Stone was the only mainstream outlet to really cover it. And to me, that was like, I was pulling my hair out. like this is obviously coordinated. There's collusion here and that's not newsworthy. That's not something that should be, you know, covered. And apparently not, you know, but I very much, you know, thank you for that.

And obviously, you know, your work since then with the Twitter files and everything that you've done to really stand up for free speech. And you mentioned, you know, the digital forensic research lab there. You mentioned the Atlantic Council. And those are two things that Matt and myself wanted to get into a little bit here. Sure. Sure.

But when we were off air just a few minutes ago, you know, we were discussing our experience trying to rebuild and it's been, you know, a very challenging process.

In fact, in 2019, you know, right after this happened, we spoke to several law firms and lawyers who seemed interested to kind of help us try to figure out some type of avenue, legal avenue to possibly, you know, recuperate, you know, our losses or whatever. But none of them really committed, citing that, you know, Facebook's lawyers were just too aggressive and it was too much like a David versus Goliath scenario, taking on one of the biggest tech companies in the world.

And then we had several more iterations of the page taken down and unpublished by Facebook. And it really made it challenging, especially during that 2019, 2020, when all of a sudden there's this whole new group of medical freedom influencers kind of taking root, a bunch of people kind of coming up through the ranks within alternative independent at Media. And then something crazy happened, of course, three months after you received the Twitter files from Elon Musk in February 2023.

You responded to an email inquiry that I sent you about coming on this very show, but you mentioned something. You said, things have come full circle. I found a big file in the Twitter files compiled by DFR Lab, the Digital Forensic Research Lab, and the same group that advised Facebook on its original removal of sites like yours and the people on the list, suspected Hindu nationalists, which is very odd. But many other ordinary Americans, conservative mostly, were and are often real.

You said, this will vindicate you somewhat. I'm going to expose their methodology as sloppy and half-ass as best. I think they were just scrolling through sites they didn't like and adding them to Excel spreadsheets. But then you. And basically, our tax dollars went to disenfranchising our own business. And man, that email really opened up a can of worms in our head and really kind of validated our suspicions and fears.

Of course, you know, that was right when you're kind of in the thick of it, dissecting the Twitter files. And, you know, our communications were scarce at best because you're not going to be doing that.

So yeah i was almost tempted to ask your assistant emily if you know if you could brush up on some notes from that time period just because we're so curious about that but do you happen to remember anything else about it because it does kind of seem to get to the heart as to why we were targeted by big tech oh well dfr labs was a major character in the twitter files and not just in that hindu nationalist story.

Probably more famously, they were one of the four partners in the election integrity partnership, which was this thing that was run out of Stanford University. Which basically it involves DFR Labs, this company called Graphica, the Center for Informed Policy at University of Washington and the Stanford Internet Observatory.

And what they were doing was reviewing information material that was related to the 2020 presidential election and then making recommendations on content to, I believe it was seven different platforms, if I'm not mistaken. So one of the things that, you know, when they opened up the Twitter files to us, we didn't have any guidance. There was nobody sitting there telling us what we were looking at.

So we just had these gigantic piles of documents. And what we would see were that they had a ticketing system in Twitter called JIRA. And basically, it was a way for them to catalog complaints about certain kinds of posts and or accounts. And a lot of these JIRA tickets had been forwarded or had been generated as a result of a complaint that came from this Stanford group, the Selection Integrity Partnership, the EIP.

And what they would do is they would then trigger a process that was semi-involved that would often lead to people just being taken off Twitter. And so that was just one example of how that works. But the key thing about that, kind of long-winded anecdote.

Is that not only were most of the EIP partners in one way or another government funded, but they also actively partnered with the State Department through something called the Global Engagement Center, and then also with the Department of Homeland Security through the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, CISA. So it was a government-partnered program to make content recommendations to all of the platforms.

And I guess what I'm trying to, that is a long-winded way of saying that I think what happened with you guys was like a pilot effort at something they did to scale later, right? So, you know, those original 800 accounts. You know, that would be like, you know, maybe an hour's worth of work a few years later, right? So, but yeah, no, I think in a way what happened with your site and with, you know, sites like Reverb Press, right?

And like all of your organizations, you were kind of the first victims of an effort to see what would happen if they just started willy-nilly removing people from the internet and it.

Seems like they they did it and it worked yeah yeah we proved it all right let's keep going yeah right and all the way up to election interference with the with the biden laptop story and it kept getting worse and worse they banned trump from from twitter and it just i mean it kept snowballing into the and and then the covid stuff you know right right yeah yeah then then we saw bloom into like full blossom and during covid where they were censoring doctors for their

speech that which is like the one of the most the most crazy campaigns i've ever seen in my lifetime where you had people saying that we need to stop misinformation by actually shutting down the free exchange of ideas on the internet and and.

You know leading to people being hurt as a result of that by following bad science and it was it was it was it was a crazy time man and then you know then elon musk buys twitter and turns it into x and he's kind of he's kind of buddy buddy with the atlantic council i don't know if you know that but like i didn't know that that's interesting he was invited out there to give an award to the prime minister of germany i can't remember name melania something like this but you know the the dfr

is an arm of the atlantic council which as jason and you guys both stated that it is funded by the u.s government you know directly by darpa and the u.s army and also companies like you know raytheon and boeing goldman sachs everybody's everybody like it's it's like an honor roll of like all the major corporate and intelligence villains.

In the world but it really is dude it's like there's got to be dr evil sitting at the head of that table with his poopy in his mouth exactly exactly and one million accounts.

But i mean so like you know the dfr now right they've kind of dropped out of the headlines but from what i can tell and like what you know i've trying to been doing some digging recently they're still contracted by all these government-funded organizations and they've just been hiring people like if you go to the atlantic council's website there's no article specifically

mentioned the Digital Forensic Research Lab. There are only, like articles about the new hires within the dfr which is kind of weird like they're like we're just building up our army and so we could we could just act behind the scenes which is kind of kind of crazy right so that's my question like do you have any insight on what they're up to now like especially under the guise of fighting misinformation or do you or are you like us kind

of in the dark about what they're doing well specifically no but i think i can pull back and And maybe with a little bit of context. An educated guess might appear, right? So what we were looking at in the Twitter files was really kind of an informal version of what was becoming formalized in a lot of other countries. So almost every European country has one or another version of the same kind of law. Like in the UK now, they have something called the Online Safety Act.

In Germany, they have something called NetzDG. The EU has a gigantic law called the Digital Services Act. And the basic structure of most of these laws is that it's not the government ordering you what to do or ordering the takedown of content. What it does is it is it essentially what these laws say is, OK, if you want to operate your Internet platform in our country, you have to abide by the recommendations of, you know, this list of what, you know, what the EU calls trusted flaggers. Right.

And it's usually a whole bunch of NGOs that have been licensed to do content recommendations. So, you know, with DFR in the United States, you know, I know of two programs that they were involved with, at least the one of them was the the the Stanford program for the election. And the other one was the virality project, which had to do with COVID. But let's just say there's no shortage of work for those types of NGOs that do that kind of content removal.

All the European countries, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, even Singapore, South Korea, they all have these types of laws where they need to outsource content review to these types of groups. So if I had to guess, I would guess that, you know, that would be the kind of work that they would be doing. Yeah. And it's even less transparent now, right? Oh yeah. Which is crazy. Right. Yeah. I want to issue a correction. I just said it was Germany's prime minister.

I was wrong. It was Italy's prime minister, Georgia Maloney, that Musk gave the award to last year. But yeah, man, it's crazy how we're seeing this take place and.

There's there was a I'm going to circle back to this, but I wanted to segue with this article that I read recently about you and also about Barry Weiss and Glenn Greenwald, how it was calling you guys mouthpieces of the far right, how you were how you got your start by your start, which is fucking stupid to claim that you got your start during Biden's administration.

Right. That's what it says. That's hilarious.

It is yeah well you you came to you know your careers came to a head by by by cozying up to the far right who put trump in power and it's a piece on the nation i read earlier i don't have the link in front of me but yeah and it basically stated how you guys became like darlings of the right and everything like that and how now that trump's in power you're basically providing lip service to him i'm like that's not fucking true at all so i i saw a piece on the racket the other day

where you explicitly called out trump's anti-semitism free speech ban right on on college campuses and and so like i where we just talked about how dfr moves and all these other organizations these ngos across the planet are being covert about their actions this move not so much right we have trump banning free speech on like on college campuses across the country and up to and including arresting people who are here legally and talking about deporting them.

And we have the right, the MAGA movement, basically cheering them on. And this is very concerning to me. I wanted to get your view on that. Do you feel like the populist right that supposedly elevated your career to where it is today, right? Right. Do you think that they're asleep at the wheel when it comes to the First Amendment? What do you think? What is your idea or viewpoint on this recent push to censure anti-Israel speech on college campuses?

Yeah, I mean, it's depressing. I mean, there's two things that I want to, two ways to answer this question. First of all, it's very frustrating that stories like Twitter files were pitched as right-wing stories when they really weren't. I had been covering this digital censorship story going back to 2018, and if you go back and look, you'll see that probably in more than half the cases, I was profiling people on the left who were being censored.

Everyone from Chris Hedges to the World Socialist website to the DSA to there was a guy in Canada called Paul Jay. There was a whole bunch of people. Status coups, some others. But even the Twitter files were significantly about suppression of left-leaning movements, not so much in the United States, but abroad. We saw a lot of material about suppressing, for instance, the yellow vest movement or Venezuela, like sort of pro-Chavez speech in Venezuela.

But the problem was that free speech during that time, the First Amendment sort of coded as a right-wing issue for some reason that I can't understand. And you ask if I'm disappointed in what's going on with conservatives and the Trump movement. I think it was really interesting after the Twitter files, especially that there were a number of people in Republican politics who came forward who I felt and still do feel are pretty sincere on the speech front. like Rand Paul.

Jim Jordan is another one. I think he's just more of an old school member of Congress. There was a time when the First Amendment was, believe it or not, relatively uncontroversial in Congress. And he harkens back to that time. And one of the reasons that I even testified before his committee is because I talked to old sort of retired Democratic members and asked their advice and they said, yeah, no, he really believes in this stuff.

So I thought they, you know, a lot of people had kind of had to come to Jesus moment about the Bush years and the Patriot Act and FISA and all these other civil liberties violations.

But, you know, what we've seen since Trump has come into office is that there's, you know, there's been kind of a shift about this the thing about you know deporting people and also withholding funding to colleges there it's a variety of different first amendment issues that are at play you know from the sort of viewpoint discrimination law like the government has the right to withhold funding to colleges they can absolutely do that they just

can't say they're doing it because of their views on Israel or because they don't crack down on protests enough. So, yeah, it's been disappointing and it's frustrating because I think that the United States is basically the last hope to prevent the kind of trend towards full kind of digital censorship that we're seeing all over the world. And if the Trump administration is not going to get behind defending the First Amendment vigorously, we're all basically in a lot of trouble.

And so I'm very worried about it. Yeah. In the libertarian circle, we compare this to Lord of the Rings when Frodo's about to throw the ring in the fire, but now he has it, you know, and that's the Republicans now have the ring and they refuse to throw it in the fucking fire. And this happens every single time we have a regime change. Yep.

Yeah. I mean, and it's funny when I testified the first time about the Twitter files, one of the things I said was, you know, look, these tools are extremely powerful and anybody who gets into power is going to have a difficult time saying, you know what, we're not going to use this because it's just such an extraordinary benefit to anybody who is sitting in an executive office.

Like if you can actually just physically dial down the attention that your political enemies get, who's not going to use that? One of the revelations from Jordan's investigation, not mine, but of when he investigated Facebook, there were all these emails where essentially the White House is asking them to dial down the traffic to Tucker Carlson's videos and Facebook saying, well, we can do it at 50%. So 50%, is that good enough?

You know, I mean, what White House is not going to use that kind of power, right? And so it's like you say, they need to throw it in the fire, but nobody's going to do it.

You know, also, I saw a interesting story by The Intercept published in mid-February about ICE actually using AI and facial recognition to identify and track and target anybody who's apparently posting negative things about it online, which really corroborates people like Derek Brose and Whitney Webb, you know, these journalists who've been kind of speaking out about this and their concerns about the AI biometric surveillance state that's ramping up under the Trump administration.

And obviously, you know, Musk is a quite a technocrat himself. So I was actually curious, you know, I noticed that on your Twitter account that, you know, you have 2 million fans on their followers on there, but you don't have any tweets. And I'm assuming that's on purpose. So I was wondering if your perception of Musk has changed since Elon targeted a sub stack. Is there been some shift in maybe? Oh, well, yeah. Elon is suppressing my account because, well, we had a disagreement, basically.

So you might have noticed, if you look at my follower account, it's frozen exactly in place from a certain date in April 2023. So, you know, whatever, that happens. But, you know, you bring up a good point about the AI-generated, you know, censorship. And again, what's so frustrating about this is you probably saw that interview between Mark Andreessen and Joe Rogan, where Andreessen talked about...

How a bunch of tech leaders in Silicon Valley were briefed by the Biden administration last year around this time about their plans for AI going forward and how the federal government wanted to be deeply involved in deploying AI for content control. And that meeting is what convinced a whole bunch of tech leaders to throw their money and support behind the Trump administration.

So the irony here, and I heard this, you know, dating back to April last year, that there was this terrible concern that was kind of buzzing around in the tech community about what was going to happen with AI going forward. There was also a lot of talk about merging with the EU, merging some of their laws with ours. And, you know, with AI, you wouldn't even have a Twitter files, right? You would just, the whole process would be automated.

And, you know, so for the Trump administration to turn around and use AI to sort of algorithmically identify speech offenders, after this supposedly was what's upset so many people, you know, when he was in his first presidency, it's just, it's just extremely disappointing. I don't know what to say.

And it feels somewhat similar to what we're watching with the anarcho-capitalist president of Argentina, Javier Malay, who, you know, kind of the same thing, campaigned on being this free speech advocate, liberty lover. And now, yeah, they're implementing AI for surveillance and police and pre-crime stuff like that. So it does seem like potentially the Trump administration is taking a page out of that playbook and.

Maybe even monitoring, you know, to see how that rollout's going, if there's any bumps in the road, if there's any pushback, stuff like that. But, you know, I did want to get your opinion here on Trump because we did just cross the two-month mark of MAGA 2.0 and Trump's second term as president. And I know in a Reason Magazine interview from last month, you mentioned that you were glad that Kamala Harris lost the 2024 election. And, you know, I think I'd probably agree with that.

But I found articles by you both kind of critical and seemingly supportive of aspects of the new Trump administration. And I know, obviously, you know, TDS, Trump derangement syndrome is so prevalent from the left. And then the Trump warship syndrome is, you know, being so adamantly stirred up from the right that it's really hard to have balanced assessments and not get pigeonholed in one direction.

And we found ourselves in this crossfire, you know, not trying to be too partisan in one direction because there is you know some nuance there that often accompanies trump's policies and positions but with that said like do you have any overarching take on like the entire administration so far like you've seen anything that you like yeah i have and i'm not afraid to say that uh not here man it's a free time you shouldn't be right i know um.

No, no, I mean, look, one thing I'll say is, and it's not like I've... Spent a lot of time around people in the Trump administration, but Trump is a very difficult read. You know, as a reporter, when I was first sent out in the campaign trail to cover him in 2015, the first thing I remember thinking is, well, this is going to work, right?

I didn't know the first article I wrote about him said something to the effect of, you know, how America made Trump unstoppable or something like that, because essentially what he was doing at that time was he was running against a system that voters had gotten tired of. And everybody else was covering this from a different perspective, whereas I could see even just in the way that he was treating the media, right?

I would be sitting in the riser with the rest of the campaign press, you know, looking at Trump and he would start tossing insults our way, like, you know, triumph the insult a comic doc or whatever it was and the crowd would turn toward the toward all the journalists and start booing and hissing and it was theater it was like you know like pro wrestling but it was also a demonstration of you know trump has a very keen political sense that he doesn't get credit for quite

a lot he just read the room and understood that there was a lot of anger towards the media out there and also that most journalists are upper class weenies and we look like that and And if you pick on us in front of almost any big crowd, that you're going to get a good reaction out of it. And he just went down the line, the media, the Fed, NATO, like one institution after the other, realizing that they'd all lost stature with voters over the years.

And, you know, that was a formula that was very powerful. It was going to work. And so there's often a lot of calculation in what he does that I think is often misunderstood. There's obviously negative things too that I wrote about in Insane Clown President. But Trump, in his heart, he's basically a salesperson. He wants to get the most people to buy his product, which is him. And so he does do things that I think he believes will have popular appeal right now.

You know, there's a lot of anger about immigration out there. So he's throwing people out of the country. Don't love that so much. But I do like the fact that he's initiating investigations into, say, COVID origins, you know, Russiagate, that he's going to be releasing... Material about other mysteries that, that popped up over the years. I liked the fact that he put censored people in positions of authority, like, like Tulsi Gabbard, even RFK Jr.

Right. I mean, I have mixed feelings about him, but Jay Bhattacharya is about to be named head of NIH. And I've met Jay. He's a great guy. He, and, and he's famous for being a victim of internet, of internet censorship. So there are things that I like and there are things that are concerning, but it's the one thing that I think Trump, history is going to have to take a while to properly evaluate Trump because there is so much noise around what he does, and it takes a little while to separate.

The TDS slash hysteria element from what he's actually done wrong. And I would just sort of say that we have to think about him more as a regular politician who happens to have a lot of support and not as this fantasy media demon that they've made him out to be. Yeah, I agree, man. And that's what's beautiful about people who actually apply nuance. You can see the good through the bad and see the bad through the good, right? And there's certainly some good coming from this.

And I agree with you, both you and Jason, that I don't know that we'd have been better off had Kamala won the presidency. I think we're better off now. I mean, if anything, this is going to accelerate some kind of massive shift in systems that we have in this country. And either through destruction or radical implementation, it should... I think that we're going to have some good on the other end of this.

You know, I think there's definitely going to be some some dark in the middle of it and how that dark looks. I'm not sure yet. You know, I like Jason was saying, and I didn't know that you were actually that that Elon Musk was attacking your Twitter and throttling it. That's oh, it's interesting. Would you would you like to go into that? That was going to get into a question about Elon Musk and this technocracy that we've been talking about.

But I'm more curious to know, like, is it because you post on Racket News and you post links to Racket News and it takes people off of X or is there some other reason? I mean, it's ridiculously silly and petty, the whole thing. But all of the Twitter files reporters were Substack people. So he knew that going in. The issue was that Substack put out a product called Notes that is Twitter-like. And when Elon saw that he went bananas also you know Substacks one of its.

Founders is a former assistant to Elon who fell out of favor with him so Elon was extremely upset that this notes product came out and, before it had he had approached me and asked me to leave Substack and kind of join this thing that he was doing, you know, Twitter subs, right? Which is like a sort of a version of Substack, I guess, where you just, you know, you see it on Twitter where people have to subscribe to see your stuff. And I didn't know that he was serious. I just said, yeah, well,

it looks great, but I'm pretty happy where I am. No thanks. And then when Notes came out, Elon got mad and he started doing all these things like making it difficult for links to open from Substack and adding error messages and doing all this other stuff. And I complained about it. And instantly he said I was dead to him. He pulled my Twitter files threads off. He put a full search ban on me.

And then it was this crazy thing. And the only reason I was trying to explain to him, I said, Elon, I can't go to... To twitter subs because then people will say we have a financial relationship and they won't they won't trust any of the twitter files reporting but he didn't accept that as a legitimate excuse and he thought i was some kind of double agent for sub stack so it was really weird really stupid.

And yeah it happened so and it still persists today apparently yeah yeah no and it's cost me a massive amount of money i can't even tell you because that was my primary means of, marketing so yeah oh man oh god yeah well we know the feeling man that's exactly i figured you look it's a lot it's a lot more personal for you this this what you know we were just hindu terrorists but this is like going on right here no it's all pretty much

the same thing and it's it's frustrating right i mean once you're on the other side of that there you, there's no like place where you can appeal to. Yeah. I'm sure you're familiar with that phenomenon of that, the frustrating feeling there. So that, that definitely seems very petty. Thank you for sharing that. And yeah, I mean, it seems like Elon might have a little too much ego invested in all this.

And I mean, I guess it kind of makes sense when you're like the world's richest man or whatever, and everybody's praising you and not everybody, especially anymore, but when, you know, for a period of time there, but yeah, it's absolutely crazy. And for better or worse, I do think Twitter has maybe improved slightly. I mean, I don't think Elon's anywhere close to a First Amendment absolutist, you know, as he's claimed to be.

But and, you know, what's funny, too, Matt, is that he actually follows the Free Thought Project and our reach there is just so terrible, man. Like we've criticized him plenty of times over the years. So I don't know, like now you shared this with me, like knowing how petty that he might be, you know, like maybe there's a possibility we got shadow banned or something as well.

But yeah probably yeah i mean or i wouldn't say probably well what i will say is twitter has a gigantic basically dashboard of things they call bots they can apply to any account. And there's hundreds of things that they give they can put on your account to slow it down in different ways they can make you invisible to your followers they can make you invisible to people who aren't your followers, like blah, blah, blah. There's like a whole long list of things.

So if he decided to make a call, and this is what happened under the previous regime, is they would say, well, let's slap this, this, and this on that account. And yeah, so if you find that your traffic doesn't feel like it's organically growing in the right way, it might not be. Yeah. Well, considering all of Facebook's tricks too, I mean, the list of fuckery is never ending, you know?

But, you know, I do want to touch on social media. I know we're getting a little bit low here on time, but maybe just a broader question about social media in 2025, because, obviously, you know, our story and, you know, the broader issues of social media and everything we've kind of been discussing about platforms like Facebook and Twitter. And, you know, they've combated misinformation, as they claim. And it's obviously been just a way to implement more State Department propaganda.

But just a couple months ago, we had Zuckerberg come out and say that they're going to be restoring reach to news publishers on Facebook and Instagram. And they said that they're ending the fact checker program for meta services, which I don't know, that seems significant. And we've seen some political shifts and policies aimed at curbing the government influence over online platforms. And obviously, now that Musk is Trump's right-hand man, that could be certainly something that's happening.

Do you feel like these developments have led us any closer to achieving a more fair and balanced framework for the free expression information exchange online? Or do you just think it's kind of like these big tech CEOs pandering to the new administration because it's kind of like a strategic move to maintain their influence and public image. Yeah, probably more the latter. I mean, when I was a journalist in Moscow in the 90s, they technically had free speech there.

But what was really going on was that every newspaper was owned by one of the major mafia groups. And so coverage on a day-to-day basis in any one of those newspapers was basically dependent upon what each mobster wanted the Yeltsin administration first and then later Putin to see.

And, you know, I think we're kind of trending in that direction where to the extent that there's any freedom or difference on any of these platforms, it's really has more to do with what the owners, individual owners are going to stress or emphasize.

Now, the one thing I'll say though, is that even as bad as that sounds, I actually prefer that to what's going on in the EU where they have a formal system with one controlling body deciding all content, You know, I think that when I talked about how I was glad that Harris didn't win, that's what I was worried about. Is the United States being folded into a system like that where instead of a whole bunch of different, you know, petty tyrants online, you would have one big one.

And, you know, it's really not a great choice, but I think the latter is kind of where we were headed. So, yeah, to answer your question, I don't think we have a free speech panacea now at all. And the thing that was originally so cool about the Internet, as you know, was that it was a place where anybody who did anything interesting could get an audience. And there was this amazing ability to share reporting or just interesting material and for communities to find one another.

And that's, you know, that kind of vision of the Internet has been shut down because governments have seen that they're vulnerable, you know, after the Arab Spring, after Brexit, after Trump got elected, after a whole bunch of other things happened. They've decided that they just can't allow that level of freedom anymore. So this is what it's going to be going forward. Yeah, unfortunately, I think you're correct. And it's, you know, we had an internet golden age there for a few years.

Well, it was actually organic, you know, all the different reach that you were getting, all that stuff that people in your feed, it wasn't geared by algorithms. It wasn't forced by, you know, the echo chamber algorithms and AI. And it was such a different time, Matt. And I definitely miss it.

You know, it seems like, you know, things have shifted in the wrong direction and become more sanitized almost like like a cable news or something like that you know right and and also yeah just to touch back again here on trump and where we're at with that and his inauguration you know just alone so many different tech leaders were there people that you know probably wouldn't have been pro-trump to begin with but they they saw the writing on the wall uh people

like bezos you know as an inauguration and yeah yeah i mean you could go down the list. And all these people now are just kind of lining up to surround themselves with Trump. And it is concerning. And I think that's why a lot of people in our circles are concerned about the technocratic push that seems to be underway here. But we are close to the show.

And I do have one last question here. I think Matt has one last white pill question, which we always try to ask at the end is like a positive question or some type of optimistic viewpoint. But at the end of our shows, we've been asking a few of our guests, including our guest, Matt Orphelia, who I know does for you with the Racket News.

We asked him where they're at philosophically right now. Because I think maybe six, seven years ago, most people might have assumed that you sit closer to the left with your own political leanings. But as time goes on, I know many people on the left feel like the left left them, and they're more moderate and centrist and maybe even right-leaning now. And I know from your article titles and headlines alone, some people might suspect that you're a Trump supporter now, like we were talking about.

But there is nuance to being pro and anti-Trump. But I was wondering, you know, with as crazy your life has been over the past five years with the Twitter files and the visit from the IRS, which we didn't get into today, and the direction of the country and all that stuff. Are you maybe a little more open to the idea of libertarianism or maybe even anarchism? And yeah, like, where do you identify politically in 2025? Yeah, so I was never any kind of like leftist or socialist.

I've always been pretty secretive about what I actually think about politics. Yes. Most of the time, especially when I was at Rolling Stone, I wasn't being asked to deliver my personal opinions so, so much. A lot of the work I did was much more just describing what's a credit default swap? How does that work? Or how does Pentagon accounting work? Right. So, you know, you don't have to tell anybody who you voted for.

But what I what I will say is that in the last, you know, eight years or so, I've become extremely disillusioned with the level of corruption in the press and in the government, frankly. And I'm probably much more willing to embrace the libertarian concept of like, you know what, let's just do no harm first than I might have been in the past. Once upon a time, I probably was much more thinking of, well, let's try to fund this or that program to fix things.

Now, in so many different realms, I've seen the government fucking things up and not even coming close to solving its problem or not even pretending to address the problem and just stealing or extending a travesty like in Iraq or Afghanistan just for contracting reasons. So yeah, I'm probably more in that direction of like, let's just get the government out of it and then try to rebuild than I was before. But that doesn't mean I'm like a Trump supporter.

I'm probably just a little bit less enthusiastic about government. Let's put it that way. I love that answer man yeah yeah that was a great answer yeah man so anyway before we wrap like jason said you know we have we have like a we like to ask our guests a white pill question but i wanted to go back to the nation calling you a mouthpiece for the establishment.

It's just cracking me up dude it's like one of the funniest things i've heard all year you know like if you are the establishment right then i guess like the free thought project has been like deep cover for the cia this whole right yeah exactly exactly it's ridiculous i mean it really is man but seriously man your work dude especially with racket news and and the twitter files you know i know i can speak for jason on this one

it's vindicated countless people including us and like it was even though we weren't able to capitalize on it like we wish we could have, the the fact that you felt it like had made the time with all the shit that was going on with you and you reached out to to let us know that that's what was going on man that fucking means a lot dude it really does it's uh it's amazing that's why i've been we've been looking forward to this conversation for a long time man it's i

just want to say thank you for that uh no of course you're welcome and and look i i'm serious i i was so offended by what what happened to to you know to you guys and and and and also just the lack of interest from you know people in new york you know with their big cushy media jobs thinking yeah screw them like yeah it's just horrifying anyway but i think i think i might have done one like one small local tv news interview when that was when that happened like the

biggest one i did was rt i believe and and. InfoWars had us on. But yeah, anyway, man, you seem unfazed and you've been still cutting through this noise, exposing this shit. And you're doing it without falling into the left-right duopoly, which is a fucking hard thing to do. Even the best of these people out there keep doing that shit and it drives me fucking crazy. Yeah. That's why it's even more maddening with the story you just shared about how Elon is throttling your reach on Twitter, man.

It's like it's not just a slap in the face to free speech right it's like a disservice to humanity like the type of reporting that you're doing is exactly what people need to break free from this fucking institutional mind traps and this propaganda right it's just it's oh it reveals how fragile the system is man that one man can do that and stop so many people from getting the information that they deserve to be getting so anyway no thank you i appreciate the sentiment i really do for sure

dude you deserve that and so much more man but like with all that said you know like like i said when i'm in on a white pill so some light in the darkness right so what what gives you hope right now man are there cracks in this machine that give you a sense that this whole thing could actually come down and be replaced with something much better yeah i i have a lot of optimism, Just take the media landscape, right?

The traditional press is losing audience share almost at freefall speed at this point. They're being replaced by this really interesting.

Sort of diverse weird new independent media complex and you know america has a long history of being innovative in terms of you know new forms of media and we always find new ways of, you know doing exciting things with speech and stuff like that and i i think we went through a period in the united states where just the the the typical american attitude toward creativity, you know because we're the country of like rock and roll and big hollywood movies

and hunter s thompson all all you know big bold brassy and humor and all that stuff that was kind of in a cage for about 20 years there and i think we're coming out of that and that sense that sort of censorious, timid, bureaucratic thing that was dominated American culture for a long time. I think it's dying. And, but, you know, obviously there are dangers that lay ahead, but I do think there's more energy and, and wit and optimism out there now than there was before.

But it's, you know, obviously we're not out of the woods yet, but I, I, that's the way I feel. I don't know how you guys feel, but it seems to me a little bit more of an interesting time than it was before. I certainly agree, dude. And I think that we do these podcasts solely so we can get to the white pill. Right, exactly. Yep. Hey, Freethinkers, this is Matt Agorist, and I'm going to take a quick pause to remind you of something really important.

First off, apologies for the interruption. But if you're still here, that means you're resonating with what we're doing, and we need your help to keep it alive. Independent platforms like ours don't survive on corporate sponsorships or mainstream media funding. We survive because of you. If you're finding value in these unfiltered conversations and real solutions, the best way to support us is by liking, subscribing, and sharing this podcast with your friends and fellow freethinkers.

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Man mad before we go dude let's let folks how know how they can support you and where to find racket news and how they can like boost your signal despite these unfortunate shadow bands oh yeah yeah i'm just at www.racket.news and that's it or at mtb on twitter but yeah i mean i don't tweet all that much anymore so well i know you subscribe to substack and you get like all these emails so it's it's even better than twitter sometimes you can you know i check my email first in the morning.

And I love to look through all those stories. So yeah. Yeah. No, it's if you happen to subscribe, we do a lot of fun stuff at the site. So we'd love it if people came out. But thanks so much, guys. I really appreciate it. Thank you, Matt. It was a pleasure. Thank you. Music.