Welcome to the Megyn Kelly Show your home for open, honest and provocative conversations. Hey, everyone, I'm Megan Kelly. Welcome to The Megan Kelly Show. Today, we've got Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone and also substory where he is making a killing. We'll get into how and why he's over there as well. But I've been looking forward to talking to him forever. We've never met, and yet I have huge respect for him. He is brave and bold and taking on Cancela culture in a way very few journalists from the quote mainstream are.

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Matt Taibbi, thank you so much for being here. How are you? I'm good. Thank you for having me. My pleasure.

I'm looking forward to this conversation because I think I feel like your politics. I know you're a liberal. I feel like you're sort of center left. I don't think you're far left. And I'm a little bit more center right. And that's I feel like we're in the same tent these days. You know, there's so much in common between our groups as opposed to these lunatics on the far extremes, you know, who have the loudest voices but don't represent the most people.

So let me just get you a little bit of background on you, since I don't know whether the audience will know you. They certainly read about you, but you grew up in Boston. You now live in New Jersey. Are you married? I am. And I have three little boys.

How old are they? They're six, five and two. Oh, wow.

You're in the thick of it. Good luck with that.

And you're a writer. You're a journalist. Your dad was a TV reporter. So that must have been back in the day. Like what? What was he doing?

Local news or helicopter stuff? What was he doing?

So, yeah, my father was a reporter at Channel five and Channel seven in Boston.

So my my childhood was basically like a movie anchorman, a lot of bad facial hair, a lot of stand ups. But he ended up working at the network. He did. He was on Dateline for a long time and NBC sort of classic down the middle, sort of traditional news reporter, investigative.

I was at a time when you could look at a reporter and say, I aspire to that.

Right. I don't like the kids today are looking at us this way.

No, there certainly are not. No, you came from a different generation. And actually, I think my father's case is interesting because of me has changed a lot in a lot of positive ways. But one of the ways that I think is negative is that, you know, back in the 60s and 70s when he got into the business, a person who was a journalist was more likely to be the son or daughter of a plumber or an electrician than, you know, an Ivy League educated person.

And he was allowed kind of the last the last wave of that sort of reporter, I would say. I have to tell you, I, I, I get it, I understand exactly what you mean. And I feel like having worked at I was at ABC for a very short time, but when I first started my career, most of the time was at Fox and then a little NBC and I saw that difference there.

I mean, Fox, Roger Ailes hired middle class people, people from middle class backgrounds and no one from elite universities that I can think of.

I would say, like O'Reilly said, he went to Harvard, but he went to the fake Harvard where, like, you go to the Kennedy School for one year, right?

Exactly. That's not real. Harvard and MIT and NBC, there's a ton of Ivy Leaguers running around.

And, man, you can feel the difference.

You can feel the difference in sort of their attitudes toward the audience, toward themselves, toward understanding the news. You know, our goal at at Fox was always to keep it simple. And so it wasn't because we disrespected our audience is because we respected them. We wanted to make it effortless to consume the news and not try to use a bunch of big words to impress anybody. Just keep it real.

Yeah. And obviously, my politics aren't the same as far as Fox is. But but I think that that approach was successful for a reason. You know, you're fundamentally changing your approach when you start bringing in a whole bunch of Ivy League people to cover the news. Because what ends up happening is, you know, the old kind of Seymour Hersh class of reporter, they saw it as their job to challenge people who are in power. And this new group of people who are now in in the media, they see themselves as being on the other side of the rope line, and they view their mission as basically to explain the point of view of people in power to the kind of unwashed masses and and apologize for them.

And so I think you you saw the change like with movies like Primary Colors. I remember that that, of course, about the Clintons.

But the premise of that film was, OK, here's here's the inside look on a presidential campaign as told to a friendly reporter who heard these stories over a bar throughout the course of a campaign as opposed to like the the the blazing hit job that it would have been from an outsider. It was kind of it was a more sympathetic portrait. And that's that's what you get these days.

So you decide to become a journalist and you move to Russia. I did.

Yeah. That was really I didn't want to be a journalist. I wanted to be a comic novelist. When I was growing up, my favorite writers were all Russians, people like Google, Mikhail Bulgakov, who wrote books like The Master and Margarita. So I wanted to learn Russian learning how to read those books in Russian. And I moved over there after doing a little bit of study in the Soviet Union. And I just I loved it over there so much that I stayed for like 11 years, basically, but I didn't have any I didn't have any skills apart from the family business, which was journalism.

So I ended up doing that as a job while I was over there. And that's how I got into journalism.

OK, so two thousand Rolling Stone, as I as I looked it up, almost famous, came out just a couple of years before that. How many times have you seen that movie?

To be honest, I've never seen that movie because I was still living in Russia when it came out. And just I think I've seen the first half of it, but I've never seen it all the way through.

Oh, my God. It's like it's it's like about a young guy who dreams of writing for Rolling Stone and goes out on the road covering this band. You know what it's about.

You've got to watch that. I know it's about Cameron Crowe. And and and it's got some some people in there who I worked with. And I have seen the other big Rolling Stone movie. Do you know where the Buffalo Room, which has Bruno Kirby is my my former boss, John Warner. He's great.

Yeah, he was really good in that movie. But yeah, you know, I missed about eleven, twelve years of American culture, so I have had to catch up a little bit like I didn't know who Pearl Jam was when I came home, like that kind of thing.

Oh, wow. Wow. So was there. And you're still at Rolling Stone, is that correct?

I am sort of, yep. I still have a podcast there. I occasionally will contribute some stuff, but mostly I, I write for a site called Subsect.

Yeah. That's that's where I'm reading you now. And we'll get to that too, because there's a reason you're doing that is there. I mean, you weren't really on the music beat, right. You were out. You did know you've been on the financial beat politics.

So it's not like, you know, everything about the Rolling Stones. It's it's this is where you honed your craft of journalism.

Real journalism on hard news subjects. Yeah, I mean, I'm basically a traditional investigative reporter that, you know, but I used I worked at a magazine, so I was kind of trained and doing the kind of feature length investigative story where you take a complicated subject and try to make it digestible for ordinary people.

Classic example was like after the financial crisis where they asked me to explain what had happened, what things like credit default swaps were, what a subprime mortgage was, how it worked, that kind of stuff. And I did that for a long, long time.

Well, I love your your writings on the financial industry. You really brought it home for me. And the one that I don't know if this is famous, but you labeled Goldman Sachs, quote, a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.

So good. It's funny. Apparently, the Goldman guys actually enjoyed that. And there's a legend. I hope it's true that that their communications person has actually has a breath squid on his desk now. So that's you know, that's it would be great.

That's how that industry works, right?

They would take that as a compliment there. That would be. Thank you. Exactly. Yes, that's that is the way they take it. All right.

So you obviously have the background to have a lot of thoughts on media. And you've been pretty outspoken about what's happened to us as an industry. I want to get to that in a second. But let's just talk about the election first, because you've been covering it as well. You're not a Trump and you think that you called him a clown who seems determined to talk us into a civil war.

And you're not really a fan of the Democrats either.

You're kind of you're politically homeless a bit given the way these parties have gone.

But I read you say that you think Trump, by losing, may have given the Republicans a future. How so? Well, I think the Democratic Party, the modern Democratic Party has been for decades now trending in a direction towards marketing themselves, essentially as a professional class party for the urban wealthy. And they have ceded basically the entire rest of the electorate to anybody who's smart enough to collect those votes. And I think what we saw in this last election is that Donald Trump not only got his base, but he started to make inroads among voters who traditionally voted Democratic overwhelmingly.

He did well. The only place where he lost support was with white men, ironically. And he did better with with black men, black women, LGBTQ voters, you know, Latino voters significantly better. And so, you know, there's a there's a kind of a working class, but there's an opening for a working class party to arise because the Democrats have rejected that as their profile.

I mean, even though they claim it, they have done nothing to earn it. And so Trump is kind of a populist hero. And he if somebody is smart, they they will be able to harness the coalition that he just put together.

You said you think this is by design, that the Democrats, they wanted Wall Street money. Bill Clinton made the Democrats. You said the party of Gordon Gekko. How so?

Well, the Democrats, after losing in 1984, there was a huge sort of internal discussion within the party. You know, what are we going to do to compete? We we never raise enough money to compete with the Republicans. They're killing us according to basically every metric. So the Democrats made a strategic decision after their landslide loss in the Mondale Reagan election, which was basically we're going to stop relying on union money to to fund our elections. And we're going to start taking money from Wall Street, from insurance companies, from big pharma, from heavy industry, from and and that fundamentally changed their platform.

They became, if you remember, a party that they started using words like the pro-growth party, we're going to run the government like a business. And they started bringing in a lot of Wall Street people and they started to change their policies.

You know, if you remember NAFTA, which had been opposed by the union backed version of the Democratic Party, was was pushed through by Bill Clinton. And and they they made this transformation to a party that was socially liberal on issues like, you know, abortion. But when it came to economics, they were more or less indistinguishable from the Republicans on on a lot of key issues. And you know, that that stuff eventually, I think, had a major impact on why Trump rose and then also why the Sanders movement rose, because they that they're no longer they don't they don't really represent the ordinary working person anymore.

Their policies are basically that the the policies that their big corporate donors want them to push through, which is why they've had a lot of success with free trade agreements. They've had a lot of success with, you know, sort of corporate tax holiday type packages.

They haven't pushed through the kinds of things that unions wanted over the years. And they've resisted things like, you know, a rise in the minimum wage, greater workplace protections, that sort of thing, traditionally that they would they would have supported in the past. So it's a it's a new Democratic Party. They're really a party for kind of upscale, urban, college educated and typically white voters. And they don't really have a platform for working class people.

Yeah, for regular people. Although they did get Biden got 90 percent of the black vote, even though Trump did raise the number of black voters he got on his side. But it is interesting to see with the surge in Latino voters going for Trump, whether that might that might carve a path that that someday blacks will follow, because with people like Candice Owens, even, you know, some of the black support we saw like 50 Cent go for Trump or at least talk about it towards the end there.

I think there is more of a push right now to encourage black voters to take a hard look. Just don't. Have a knee jerk instinct to vote Democrat, because you've been told for all these years they're better for you, that they might not be better for you. And that's how most people are explaining what happened for Trump with the Latinos. And some increase in the black vote is that people were voting their pocketbook and not identity politics. Yeah, and this has a lot to do with the way the Democrats view the electorate.

They a lot of the consultants on K Street and within the Beltway, they make a lot of kind of blanket assumptions about how people are going to vote based on identity, first and foremost. So they you heard Joe Biden say during during the race, you know, if you're not voting for me, you ain't black.

Right.

And this is this is like a thing where I think a lot of the Democratic Party people assume that anybody who's black must vote Democratic.

Anybody who's college educated must vote Democratic. And they've stopped coming up with a real rationale and in many cases for why that has to be true. Also, they don't they just reject the idea that some people think about other criteria beyond race and identity. I mean, there are a lot of people who might see themselves more, as, you know, working class than than the member of an ethnic group. But that's just not part of the thinking of the party these days.

But now the that same party, the Democrats and the media, but I repeat myself, they have become super focused on identity politics, uncancel culture. I mean, they're working together, I think, to push to push cancel culture. And this is one of the things you've been such an astute observer of. It's I encourage everybody to read. You go to substory and subscribe and you can read. It's like, you know, the what's his name and his name is escaping me right now.

I wrote Angela's Ashes.

It's like chewing rubies in your mouth reading that TV, because really because you have a way of putting this cancer culture back into words that make us all feel good. And I think it is one thing that's bringing people who aren't that hardly partisan together. I have so many center left friends who are like. They're agonizing over this. They're disgusted by it and they feel like we're destroying each other, that we're we're actively trying to bring each other down.

And I know you've written about how it seems like that the new mission now of this sort of new movement is to search out thoughtcrime, the search out thoughtcrime and anything can be an offensive.

You cite the UCLA professor who got in trouble for reading an MLK letter out loud.

Right, right, right. Yeah, yeah. Because it had the N-word in it, which, you know, the context should matter, but apparently it doesn't.

There was there was another professor who was actually speaking Chinese and a Chinese word that he used sounded like the N-word and he got in trouble for for using that. So, yeah, it's a it's a problem. There's a kind of hunt for an orthodoxy that's going on right now with within the Democratic Party and in the media. And that's that's a major problem. You know, I grew up, you know, at a time when being a liberal meant being the person who accepted, you know, all different points of view and welcomed the debate.

Right. So that the the card carrying member of the ACLU is the person who was who was proud of the fact that the ACLU defended the Nazis at Skokie. We were the people who were against, you know, Tipper Gore trying to put labels on and, you know, record albums and that sort of thing, or or Ed Meese censoring things that he thought were pornography. Always the idea was like it was liberal to be in favor of speech.

And there's now basically a starkly opposite new ethos among young people who are coming up as Democrats. And that's it's it's it's frightening because the traditional defense of speech therapist is that that group anymore.

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You say in one piece on June 20 20 entitled The American Press is Destroying Itself, it feels liberating to say after years of tiptoeing around the fact that the American left has lost its mind, it's become a cowardly mob of upper class social media addicts, torching reputations and jobs with breathtaking casualness.

Why? What, like why? How did the left get here?

How did they switch from that old sort of liberal group that fought for free speech to this group that just wants a scalp?

Some of it has to do with some fashionable trends in academia, you know, critical theory, postmodernism. But a lot of it, I think, has to do with the Internet and the way that young people talk to each other and organize these days.

And these days, there is a kind of a shortcut to to believing that you're making a difference, which is by getting somebody fired or getting somebody disinvited to a to your school or, you know, getting up, costing somebody a book deal or a prominent position. And all it takes is is like a whole bunch of people on on Twitter or on Instagram or whatever it is sort of ganging up on somebody for a couple hours. And that could be it.

I mean, you could cost somebody a job that quickly. And I think people have the illusion that this is what political action is. It's really not that at all. It's you know, politics is actually when you're doing it right is a you know, it's a deeply boring grind. Grind it out, you know, a grueling kind of organization, heavy process. It's not something you can just flick on your phone and do in two minutes. But they've they've sold a generation of people on the idea that this is progress and it's you know, it's it's become this dangerous weapon.

Right. Like, you know, a lot of people are getting caught up in it. And it's also had an effect on our business because now people are terrified to say anything they think might get them in trouble.

Yeah. Now I see these guys as bullies. That's what they are. They're just bullies.

And it's ironic because we've spent years now in wake of these school shootings and the awfulness we've seen. They're running these anti-bullying campaigns and trying to make people more sensitive to what the mob ganging up on somebody can do and to paying attention to those feelings. And now the very people who have been pushing those campaigns and trying to educate us on what happens, turn around. And they're like the amoeba. They swarm together and it's kill, kill, kill.

And they they get a high off of it. They get a high off of getting somebody fired.

Who it's so sick when you think about it.

Oh, it's it's it's repulsive. And and it's also breeding this this whole new mentality where people think that it's it's politically a virtue somehow to always be, you know, in the group. Right. Like in other words, if you're if you're the you know, on the outside, if you're all by yourself and taking a position that nobody else is taking, then there must be something wrong with you.

It's only virtuous to be in in, you know, in the herd and that and they and they hammer home that that idea relentlessly, you know, and especially with people like myself, but to a lesser to to a greater degree, like people like Glenn Greenwald, you'll see that what they what they say most often is look at how how willing he is to stand outside the crowd and not go along with what everybody else is saying.

How dare he, you know, and that's what we love about him. Yeah, exactly.

That used to be the mark of of a of an intellectual who who, you know, had the deeply felt beliefs and was was courageous. And now we don't value that at all. Now we now we think that that's a bad thing. And, you know, that's a very, very dangerous mentality. And again, I went to school in the Soviet Union. It was at the end of that tenure. But I'm very familiar with that mindset of the cowardly mob.

And, you know, the the individual who, you know, who ends up in trouble for, you know, kind of saying the wrong thing and and being honest. And that's that's not a good dynamic.

Now, to your point about Glenn, who just resigned from the organization, he started the intercept saying this has gotten out of control. We created it to be a hands off journalism enterprise where we didn't have pressure from above. And now. I and other journalists here are getting censored and pushed to support the Democratic Party, and I'm not doing it. I'm out out of there. But one of the things that separated him from Democrats and liberals was heated up by Russia gate at all, and neither did you, for that matter, and thought it knew it was bull right from the beginning.

And he he used to work for it. Was it Salon? Because Joan Walsh came out and commented on this. And can you just tell folks like so he gets in trouble with the left because he didn't support Russia. He thought it was bullshit and he was so he was accused of being like a Russian stooge. OK, so this is where the left went, OK, you don't support it. So you must be a Russian stooge or you're basically working for Putin.

And then Joan Walsh, who sees everything, everything through identity politics, weighs in as somebody who used to work with Glenn saying what you actually said, that Glenn Glenn's views on Russia were tainted by his distaste for where the Democratic Party had gone. And she she said that part of that was the rise and influence of women and people of color. So essentially, she's saying that he doesn't believe in Russia because he's a racist and misogynist. And it got worse than that.

The The New Yorker did a story, a big feature called The Bane of their existence about Glenn that hypothesized essentially that he was not buying the Russia story because he had a tortured pathology growing up as a as a confused young gay man in America with daddy issues. So, you know, you're a racist, a misogynist, sexually confused, pathological case if you don't go along with Russia. And that's like the starting point of what you get if you cross the herd on issues like this.

It's amazing.

It really pisses me off. I'm laughing, but it actually pisses me off like it makes me angry.

And I think people like Glenn, like you and like me, for that matter, catch it in a particular way because they don't go after Sean Hannity like this because they expect that from him.

But if you're somebody who they thought was on their side, there's a particular ire right there, betrayed that you would ever break the party line, which, of course, is what a journalist is supposed to do.

There is supposed to be a party line. You're supposed to challenge stories, challenge politicians. Your fealty should be to no one but the truth.

And if you happen to be one of the lucky ones who can see it through all the massive dark clouds like Russia gate, et cetera, it's a gift, not something to be shamed because you had daddy issues, allegedly.

This is what's happening.

Yeah, I again, I grew up in the media at a time when it was valued. And I've I've actually worked very hard in my career not to really let people know where I stand politically or what my actual inner political feelings are. I think that should be a little bit of a mystery to readers. But in this period, that's that's totally unacceptable. And they they went after everybody. And it's it's interesting that you bring that up about but Hannity, because, you know, the same people who are going after, you know, heretics like the Glenn and myself and you are the same people.

They're the exact same people who cried foul when the Dixie Chicks, you know, had all their albums burned in the Bush era. They're like, oh, my God, look at those people. They're anti thought they're they're thugs and bullies. And they don't want to let people express themselves. And they're turning around doing exactly the same thing. It's just that the politics are different this time. Right. It's so frustrating to watch.

Yes. I'm seeing a lot of it just now because you like I said on Twitter, I wrote on Twitter that I thought Trump won the third presidential debate. Some of these Democrats felt betrayed, like what's happened to you. And then this weekend, I was tweeting about, you know, this is kind of a B.S. call for unity by Biden. It wasn't even a call for unity. He had announced that it had happened. He got he won the election.

And we are unified. We are strengthened. We are healed. Right. So, no, we're not. And we're not going to be. And the only people who are calling for that are the people on the winning side.

They want unity because they don't want opposition to their agenda. This is the point I was trying to make, which is a hundred percent correct. And you know what I got and I can understand whatever criticism.

I don't really care as people have about getting criticized, but I got a lot a lot of how could you how could you say that like you are supposed to be anti Trump. He attacked you. He called you a bimbo.

He said you had blood. Get out of your wherever he went after you for months and months and months, how could you? They felt betrayed, by the way. Joan Walsh was one of them, but one of many.

And obviously, Matt, I don't think they they can understand how some of us are able to separate our personal views, our personal experiences from our analysis of the news.

Right, and it's amazing that they can't recognize that because all you're doing is your job, right? Right. Your job is to separate that out. Yeah. Trump was horrible to you. I think we all know it. We all saw that happen. But that doesn't mean that you're automatically required to take a you know, to to push a narrative, you know, on command just because you might have personal feelings about Donald Trump. That's not how it works.

The job the job requires that you take a step back and honestly call things as you see them other. Otherwise, what are we doing? We're not providing any extra service if if we're not doing that. Right. So, so true. Right.

So I looked at it and it happens on both sides. Right. Because I think for a while there, the left loved me because they thought I challenge Trump and he came after me. And so I must be a.. Trump. So they're like, OK, great, you're your team Democrat, which I never was. And then the right got mad, too, because I asked Trump a very tough debate question. I asked them all very tough debate questions.

Just Trump made a thing out of his and then the right was like you.

You crossed us, you crossed him. You're never Trumper. It's like I was never a Trump like I was.

I'm not a never Trump or I'm not a pro Trump or I'm a journalist.

And, you know, you look back at my history, I punched Dick Cheney in the face rhetorically. I went after Karl Rove when he talked nonsense on election night. I had a big dustup with Newt Gingrich. I could go on. I've always challenged people on both sides. And it's almost like the viewers just develop an expectation because you're fair that you're always just going to lean to their side. And I do think people like you, people like Glenn, and especially in today's day and age, that's just no longer OK.

You got to pick a team. And if you don't, you're out. You're out of the circle.

Yeah, no, they've made it very explicit. Now, I think it's worse on the left, on the quote unquote left than it is on the right. Yeah, it was amazing for me watching Fox News on on election night and seeing people disagreeing with Donald Trump and and criticizing him. I mean, there was there wasn't a ton of it, but there was some of it. And you won't see any of that on MSNBC.

But but look what's happening to Fox right now. I mean, are you following that happening to them? Yeah, they're losing viewers by the thousands and they're they're going over to Newsmax and other places. They're pissed.

People are angry at Fox News right now for calling Arizona early in many people's view, for for pronouncing Joe Biden the president elect. And, you know, I think Bret Martha at the middle of it, like we're trying to do journalism.

The decision desk says he's one, you know, we're going to announce it, but that's how divided we are.

It's like you've got to be all in for one guy or the other or you can to get your head chopped off. Yeah.

And it's so unfortunate because once upon a time, you know, I think if you go back and look at like the the Walter Cronkite Jessica Savage type anchorperson, nobody would have looked to those people with the expectation that they'd be endorsers of of political views. Their value was was that you believe them when they said something. Right. And and that was that was the entire point of the commercial enterprise.

That was the news back back in the day, was that you trusted the information that came over those now who trust anything that comes over any of these networks, because they've all that's why I really think the future is it's individual.

It's people like going to subscribe to Matt Taibbi. Right. It's it's people listen to this podcast saying, I trust her.

I trust him. I don't think the future is going to be news organizations and individuals. I think it's going to be much more specific than that. But two things. Number one, Jessica Savage is pretty much the reason I became a journalist.

I saw I was kind of interested in doing it.

I made a resume tape when I was an unhappy lawyer and I was home one day from my law job. I still practicing law and I was lazing around on the couch. I wasn't feeling well. And lifetime television, Matt? I don't know. I'm not afraid to admit it.

On came the Jessica Savage story.

And it was so good. It wasn't it was not a reenactment. It was a documentary. And it was so good. And I was inspired.

I was like, this one came up during an age where there were no women in journalism.

And if she could do it, why am I sitting here on my couch feeling sorry for myself for, like, get off your ass, go do it.

And that was the day I started cold calling news directors and it hideously with a drug problem.

And she went off a bridge and died. But let's just table that for now.

But the second thing I wanted to ask you about was you raised and have been you know, you seem as moved by the I think this is the worst story in council culture.

And it's hard to pick one. It really is, and but like I'm terrified by the story of what happened to Lee Fang, speaking of the intercept, which Glenn just left his his organization, can you can you just tell me?

I don't think most people understand who the hell Lee Fang is or what happened to him, but it is the worst story I've heard so far in council culture.

Yeah, it's complicated. So Lee is a an investigative reporter at The Intercept, a very talented kind of old school investigative reporter, the kind of person who's really comfortable with documents and FOIA searches and that sort of thing. And he just occasionally comments on Twitter. He's Chinese American. He's from he grew up in the Baltimore area. And he had, I guess, tweeted a few things over the course of the last year or so, including an interview with an African-American man during the protests over the summer.

And the the person that he was interviewing said, you know, why is it that people only go out in the streets when a cop kills a black man? What why aren't there protests when you know there's we kill our own right? Essentially, I forget what the exact quote was, but it was just an interview of that of this person.

It was why why does a black life matter only when a white man takes it. That's a black man he interviewed said and then he talked about someone he knew who had been killed. A black man by another black man.

Yeah, that is it was a family member, actually. I ended up talking to the guy. Very smart guy, very thoughtful. And and, you know, it's not an uncommon thing to hear. I mean, I wrote a book about the death of Eric Garner. And so and you do hear that sentiment like, you know, how come there's there's only this press attention when this this kind of thing happens and not when other things happen. So he just he ran a clip of that interview and one of his colleagues essentially said, why are you publishing this racist point of view?

And before you knew it, there were like thirty thousand people hitting the like button, really had to go to H.R. He had to write a formal apology, basically to keep his job. And, you know, he published that and there was a little public mending fences.

But, you know, the message there is basically like if if other journalists decide that something you say is racist or misogynist or whatever it is, it doesn't take much for your job to be on the line like within ten minutes. I mean, that's basically what happened. Tell me about it. And he he is a this is a one of the better young reporters that we have in the business, I would say. And he doesn't particularly do a lot of editorial commenting.

That's the other thing that's interesting about this, which which he didn't hear. Yeah, right.

And you know, and also, you know, he grew up in kind of a tough neighborhood. He he had it's informed by in part by his own experience. You know, it was a Chinese American and yet none of it mattered, you know, like, it's it's just that the whole episode kind of demonstrated how how the herd mentality works in this business. Now, like, if you if you step out of line, like you're you could be out in like by the end of the day, that's how fast.

And it doesn't have to be somebody like me with a history at Fox News. It can be somebody who's a lifelong Democrat who actually is is part of a minority group who has been sympathetic to the cause.

Doesn't matter one one false move and f you you're out.

And what his he had committed an earlier thought crime, which was he had tweeted out a tweet questioning the logic of protesters attacking immigrant owned businesses that had no connection to any police brutality or anything.

And and that got him in trouble first. So he was on probation. Like, why would you question the rioters burning down businesses owned by immigrants? That says something about you. And then the second offense was this one, you know, interviewing a black man who wanted to raise awareness about there is a black on black crime problem. And that led to his calling. Her name was Akela Lacey.

I'm just going to read what she what she tweeted at the time. I was like, oh, you've got to be kidding me. She tweeted out, Tired of being made to deal continually with my coworker Lee Fang, continuing to push black on black crime narratives after being ripped.

He did, they asked not to. This isn't about me and him, it's about institutional racism and using free speech to couche anti blackness. I am so fucking tired. Stop being racist, Lee. No.

Then all these other people, instead of saying these are not racist, he's trying to report the news, jumped on the bandwagon. You pointed out in one of your articles, a former Elizabeth Warren staffer actually tweeted, get him get.

Yeah, no one defended it.

Very few people jumped to his defense because that can be fatal to. Right. But that's the other thing is it's part of this new mechanism is if you come to the defense of a person who is is deemed unorthodox, you yourself can quickly fall under suspicion. So people just tend not to do that either. Nelly's leak kept his job. But you know that it's it's a tough thing to have for people to have to go through. And a lot of people don't keep their jobs in these situations.

So it's it's, uh. And what ends up happening is, is that all the reporters and I hear from them all the time, and it's not it's not even just about the race issue.

It's about all kinds of issues. They all see where the line is. They all see what the narrative is and what they're supposed to be saying and what they what they maybe want to say. But they just stay far away from where the line is because they don't want to have to deal with that problem. So just take an example of another reporter I heard from just just last week. You know, there were there was somebody who wanted to do a little piece on it.

If Trump loses, the media might have to do a little bit of a reckoning and reexamine why we've lost so much trust in the last four years. And, you know, the idea was rejected. But there's there's lots of people who are going through that certainly like, do I say something? Do I not say something? And most people just don't say anything.

If you do say something like, you know, you're talking, you're writing about it. I'm talking about it. You get so many messages. I'm sure you do. I know I do. From people thanking you, people in our industry and outside of it saying, thank God, you know, I wish I could say what you're saying.

And but they're afraid, even like a tweet, is that you really think you can be fired for liking a tweet.

It happened to some guy who like to trump tweet. So it's like people are afraid to make any false move. And to your point about how people won't come out and defend you, you know, I didn't know this piece of the story, but you had written in that in the Lifan case when his accuser, Akua Lacy, was questioned about, wow, this guy's gotten a lot of fallout. You know, he had to he had to issue a public apology for, quote, insensitivity to the lived experience of others, you know, sort of saying to her, like, what do you think about this?

She said, look, there is more concern about naming racism than letting it persist.

That's what you get hit with. If you try to defend anybody who's been accused, you're focused on the wrong thing. It's not that I may have falsely accused him. It's that he did it right. Just trust me. He did it right. Yeah. Yeah. And that that that is what you'll get. And most people just don't want the hassle. So they just go along, you know, and or the reporters are so afraid. Everyone's afraid.

But you would expect journalists who used to be used to be known as kind of tough back in the day, in your dad's day, you would expect them to take just to adhere to the facts. That's all. You don't even have to. I guess I would like them to defend people who are defensible, but like just stick to the facts and they won't they won't report facts, report facts now that they find troubling. That's what Glenn was saying.

He had to leave the intercept because they wouldn't let him report facts that may have reflected poorly on Biden and well on Trump. And so I you tell me whether we get out of this. Let's stick to journalism for a minute. How do we get out of this?

Because most of our industry has surrendered to the mob and surrendered to their own progressive biases, separate and apart from the work mob. You know, they're no longer interested in reporting the news straight. They only want to report stuff that's good for the left. And as I look at the landscape, I say they don't come back from this. The journalism industry does not come back from this.

Yeah, I don't think the legacy media organizations, unless they reform themselves considerably, can come back from the direction that they've chosen because people just don't believe them anymore, that they don't see them as anything other than representatives of a political line. And that's not where the value is in the news business. I mean, Glenn talks about this all the time. The the interview the Joe Rogan gave with Edward Snowden had like 15 and a half million views, which is like, you know, 12 times the size of a typical cable news audience.

The the the the MSNBC CNN audience has been massively displaced. And there's there's a gigantic audience of people who no longer have faith in these traditional media organizations.

So I think they got to they've either got to rediscover what what their roots are and and start seeing themselves as people who can speak out about anything and challenge power and look in all directions or else they're going to become irrelevant more within that.

One second, I'm going to ask him about Rob and Angelo's white fragility, which he has said, quote, Maybe the dumbest book ever written. You're going to want to hear him on that.

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OK, now before we get back to Matt and the dumbest book ever written, we're going to bring you a feature that we do on the show, sometimes called Asked and Answered.

And this is when we bring in the executive producer of The Megan Kelly Show, Steve Krakauer, who has been poring through the questions to find some goodies.

What have we got, Steve?

Yeah, we've been getting a lot of questions and you can continue to email your questions into questions at Devil May Care Media dot com. These are two that came in that were both sort of about the media. So put them together first. Jon Gabber Tokyo asks, We all know the mainstream media despised President Trump. We also know that the mainstream media benefits from him financially. So the one thing I can't figure out is why do they want him out of office so bad if it actually would hurt them financially?

The question also, Jason Goldstein wants to know if editorial boards should pledge to have a certain number of people from divergent political backgrounds, particularly in the results of this election. Hmmm, that's a good one, so John, I think it's ideological, that's the bottom line. They don't care. They'd rather that they sort of see it as a higher calling to get him out because they they I don't think they're just calling him racist and all those things.

I think they genuinely believe it. I mean, they believe everyone's a racist who's a Republican. So they really believe he's a racist.

So I think it's easy. They're like he's got to go because he doesn't make me feel good about myself. And getting rid of him wouldn't. If it has to cost ratings, so be it. I think the question Jason raised about editorial boards is really interesting. And I would I would love to see it. Even if you got like a token Republican on some of these boards, I think it would help, but I'll bet you they'd fire them soon thereafter.

You know, they they say they want to hear what, you know, the other side of the country thinks. But then as soon as somebody speaks up and tells them they get fired or they pull their editorial or whomever, the The New York Times fired that editor who let Tom Cotton's editorial run, they had to be fired because an editorial on whether we needed a military presence to control the civil unrest this past summer was endangered black New York Times employees.

So that's how that goes. That's why you know anybody. That guy was a liberal, the editor who got fired.

Can you imagine if you've been a Republican, how fast you would have gone? But I'd love to see it. And I'll tell you where else I'd like to see it on school boards. Right. Like, what are you doing?

School board to insure yourselves that you are representative of, if not half the student body and their family politics, that at least some significant percentage, even here in New York City.

I've had to say to our schools so many times, you know, you have Republicans at the school, right? You know, after Trump won twenty sixteen, all the letters that went out, like, we understand how difficult this time is.

And they had support groups like you understand that not everybody is crazy left in this town mostly, but not everyone, like, calm down.

I mean, on that subject, isn't it so interesting how quickly the boards came off all the windows, the storefront windows everywhere, where they tried to tell us it was both sides, they were worried about both sides rioting? Sure. As soon as Joe Biden was announced, the winner suddenly no more fear of looting.

So I'd love to see more balance at the corporate level, at the academic level, certainly at the university level, where they've got something like four percent conservatives in the incoming classes. But I confess, I think it's just a pipe dream. I don't think they really have any interest in understanding half of the country. And it's a shame. What do you think, Steve? Yeah, I would tend to agree with you, I mean, I think that your point about the editorial boards, I mean, you look at the idea, I think that there's there's certainly political biases that are that are happening within the media, but there's also a geographic bias.

And if you've got a media that is, you know, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fox News, even certainly ABC, CNN, CBS, you know, you could walk within an hour and visit the headquarters of all those places in New York City and and hit them all. I mean, that's a big problem also. But until you start to look outside of that, you're going to have a lot of similarities in the thinking that goes into the, you know, the executive ranks of these of these organizations.

Well, and, you know, it's been funny during the Trump era is these organizations are like we have Republicans, we've got Steve Schmidt.

He works for the Bush administration. We've got Nicole Wallace. She shepherded through Sarah Sarah Palin, you know, The Washington Post. We've got Jennifer Rubin, who hates conservatives with every fiber of her being.

Maybe it wasn't always thus, but that's how they get away with it. They get some die hard, never. Trumper who's got some who used to have some GOP street cred and say, like, we're diverse, we're ideologically diverse.

And, you know, people are on to that now. But I do think when I look around at who gets chosen for those roles that it's OK to be a Republican so long as you love Donald Trump, rather.

Just make sure. Exactly. And that's that's the thing. That should be the question. Find someone who makes decisions that at least knows someone who who they like and respect, who voted for Donald Trump, like start their. I don't know, I think people should start saying it loud and proud, if you like him, don't be embarrassed about it. As you saw, 71 million people feel the same.

It's like Dennis Prager was saying yesterday, this half of the country, they're not alone. They're not no matter how many, the people who control the media and Hollywood and academia and big tech and corporate America tell you you're not alone. Half the country is with you. So you remember that the next time you try to get shamed out of your POV. All right.

So questions plural at Devil May Care Media if you would like to weigh in. We love hearing from you guys and we'll do this again soon.

Part of the problem, of course, is there's no accountability, the media has pursued so many storylines that they told us were awful, awful for Donald Trump got and gotten them totally wrong, and then never even acknowledged how wrong they were met it like the list of so-called bombshells that weren't and that they never went back to clean up is as long as Santa scroll at this point.

Yeah, I'm actually I'm actually putting out a little a little movie about that soon. I actually went back and made a list of all the bombshells that had to be walked back or retracted it.

I mean, what are a couple of your favorites?

Just to take a couple of examples, like remember all the stories about George Papadopoulos and how he was he was the beginning of the end of the FBI investigation and that that was where it all started. I mean, almost every news organization did these big features about Papadopoulos and his secret contacts with the Russians. Well, about a year ago, there was testimony that was declassified where the FBI, the former deputy head of the FBI, Andrew McCabe, said that they knew by August of 2016 that the evidence, quote, didn't particularly indicate that Papadopoulos had had contact with the Russians.

So in other words, the the entire predicate for the Trump Russia investigation they knew was bogus within about a month of starting that investigation. And nobody went back and reported that. I mean, that's that's hundreds of stories that were out there, you know, the Carter Page stories, right, where they they were reporting constantly that there was probable cause that he was an agent of a foreign power. He was asked about that on television. Now, it turns out that the court ruled based on a fraudulent FISA application.

So where were the retractions for that? You know, that they didn't do any.

That's the new thing. You don't retract. You just move on. Or like The New York Times is doing with a 16 19 project, which is a lie.

She's won a Pulitzer for writing this thing, but it's replete with lies, the very foundation of the piece, which is that America was founded on slavery and to preserve it is a lie.

You just take out your eraser and you erase those lines from your piece and you don't disclose that you've done that.

You just have to have reporters watching the reporters all the time to do comparisons between the original piece and the piece every day thereafter online to try to catch them taking out their lies so that it doesn't become a bigger deal.

Yet you have to you're right, you you literally have to use the Wayback Machine now to compare and contrast the old version of the story with a new version of the story, because they are they're doing this kind of silent editing technique. Now, sometimes you'll see at the bottom of the story a note that says, you know, in an earlier version of this story said X, Y and Z.

But there they they leave it out a lot, too. And they'll fundamentally change what what the story says just by changing a few words.

And you won't know. Right. Right.

And that's that's pretty scary. That's kind of Orwellian, actually. Right.

So that's the lesson is you can just go ahead, misreport willfully or to be charitable negligently. I believe often it's willful. I mean, there's no question that Nicole Hannah Jones, Johns's 16, 19 piece was willfully fraudulent there.

Just the fact that she still got that Pulitzer, even though a group of very esteemed academics, professors like Glenn Lowry, who who is also black, but a contrarian, as he calls himself, you know, he doesn't buy sort of the you know, blacks are victims and they need the white people to bend the knee and all the rest of it. Well, by the way, he's coming on the show since I'm looking forward to that. Anyway, they called for that Pulitzer Prize to be pulled.

And if it doesn't get pulled, it will have no more meaning for the future.

But anyway, so so the goal is I mean, the messages that you can willfully or negligently misreport reality so long as what?

Well, you can do it. And without consequence, you can misreport because the news organizations have figured out that if you're, let's say, a blue leaning organization like The New York Times of The Washington Post, and you get something wrong about Donald Trump or Rudy Giuliani or whatever it is, who cares? Your audience isn't going to care and they're not. So they're not going to see those corrections and they're not going to demand them either. Like it's not important to them.

So what there's this drift is taking place in the business where we just don't worry about making sure that we're right in the same way that we used to like it used to be. I don't know about you, you know, but I used to every time I did a story, I couldn't sleep the day before it was published because I was so, so worried that I got something wrong in there because it would stick to you forever if you made a bad mistake.

I don't think they I don't think the young people in the business feel that way anymore. It's not quite the same approach. Doesn't feel like.

Absolutely. I can agree with you more. I think there's so many reasons for that. But that's definitely the new normal. And now the question is, what do we expect from these folks going into what appears to be a Biden administration like the CNN's Brian Stelter? I mean, I hate citing this guy. He's never practiced journalism. So but he's going to sit there and actually be a critic. Of course, it's interesting how his criticisms are only of Fox News, really never.

Never of anybody else.

He's come out, right. He's come out and said coming soon, a restoration of normal relations between the president and the press.

And then he elaborated saying this is a quote, the media's adversarial approach that you've seen during the Trump years to demanding truth from power, calling out lies, criticizing indecency.

That approach serves us well, no matter who holds high office. If Biden says the blue sky is red, the media must call it out.

Of course, different degrees of deception deserve to be treated differently.

A slip of the tongue must not be equated with a smear campaign. But in all cases, the media stay on the side of truth.

I'm feeling you feeling it. I feel I got the chill. Yeah.

I mean, who does he think he's kidding?

I know the pomposity is is pretty impressive, actually. I got to give him an A plus for that one. He's he's, he's, he's pretty good when it, when it comes to, you know, that sort of highfalutin prose. But no, it's look, it's ridiculous. This started even before Trump was president. What I worry about going forward with Biden is that the press is going to collectively decide we're not going to report on stuff that gives the Republicans any any ammunition to go after this administration, because that would be bad and that would that might risk another Trump or whatever it is.

And, you know, we're going to see pretty quickly how how critical they will or won't be. My guess is they'll be very, very docile.

Absolutely. They're going to be defending most of what he does and not criticizing. Ninety nine percent of it. That's. I feel like that's clear. So we'll see Brian Tucker Carlson in the hall monitor. Also, the unique, which is mean, but hall monitor is funny.

I've got to ask you, it was the most brilliant column ever that you wrote on White Fragility, this absurd book that has been making the rounds since the summer and making Robin D'Angelo, its author, Rich, as she peddles not only her book, but class is based on her book, along with a message that you can never get over your white supremacy. You have to work on it for the rest of your life, which is very convenient for the person who offers the classes and how you must deal with your white supremacy on an ongoing basis.

You call it the dumbest book ever written and I.

I love you say it's part of this new sort of anti-racism movement that is a, quote, dingbat racialist cult.

Yeah. What do you mean? So the racial consensus that we lived under for most of the last 50 years was based on I think, you know, Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech.

And it was based on the idea that people are people and that even if we have differences, even if we belong to different races, we're all people. And that our goal is should be to try to get along, you know, and to, you know, even if imperfectly, even if we're not there yet, that should be the goal as a society is for all of us to live together in harmony and and not to worry about our racial differences.

This new anti-racism movement takes a completely opposite approach where it says actually the problem is, is that we are not spending enough time thinking about race. We should have heightened awareness of our differences. And people who are white should ponder their whiteness all the time. And we should be constantly thinking about all the invisible ways in which race and racial perception affects our lives, which is exactly the opposite of what the is. Kingi an approach to racial relations was.

So I think that this it's it's remarkable that people like Robin D'Angelo actually have a lot in common.

Their writings with with people like Richard Spencer, they they are hyper focused on white supremacists, on on.

Yeah. Research on what the different races are and how they how they behave and as opposed to just seeing all people as people. And I think that's that's the thing that's crazy. Yeah, well, the difference is, Spencer believes that there's something inherently deficient about blacks and inherently superior about whites, and D'Angelo thinks it's exactly the opposite. It's no better. It's no less racist. She just switched the races. And I know you called it tricked up pseudo intellectual horseshit disguised as corporate wisdom and pointed out this is hilarious.

It's Hitlerian race theory that says and this is a quote from the book, A positive white identity is an impossible goal. There's nothing to be done except, quote, strive to be less white, like, OK, I'll work on that. I guess I'll I'll work on that somehow. I'm not sure, not sure what to do, but Robyn's going to tell me how I can be less white, I guess. Well, right. Look, it's it's a grift basically.

Right. I mean, these people who who go to the come out of, you know, certain universities and then they go to big companies and they say, we're going to clean up your your workplace toxicity issue. And all you have to do to to to get there is by our six thousand dollar an hour, you know, speaking program and have each of your of your employees go through a an endless series of exercises to work on being less white, whatever that means, which is it's it's preposterous on so many levels and insulting.

And it leads to some pretty crazy places. You know, there are lawsuits. And in New York City where some of these programs have said things like, you know, white teachers shouldn't be teaching non-white kids. You know, like if you if you extrapolate this kind of thinking out all the way, it leads to some really, really lunatic kind of thinking.

So, yeah, it's it's nuts, blatantly racist and is she is a racist. That's but she's been celebrated like she's the second coming, you know, Jimmy Fallon fawning over her. She's been on all, you know, CNN all over. They they all love her because I think they're trying to assuage their white guilt and put some some money into the the hostage fund just in case they do something that's considered racist or say something it's considered racist.

I had Robin D'Angelo on. I was ready I was ready to confess how bad I was because I was striving to be less white, you know, and I like this woman.

Not only she dishonest, Matt, she's she's an anti intellectual.

You know, you you you wrote a great line, which was she she writes like a person who was put in time out as a child for speaking clearly.

And here's the quote of of you.

You wrote of her book, When there is disequilibrium in the habitus, when social cues are unfamiliar and or when they challenge our capital, we use strategies to regain our balance.

Yeah, I think what she means in human language is like, you know, people find ways to deal. I think I think that's what she's trying to say. But you just use too many words to get there. But yeah, no, the irony of this is is incredible. Right? Look, America is going through this massive national discussion about racism and what's the first thing that happens? A white clip, clearly a disturbed author, racist to the top of the bestseller list because you have all these sort of suburban and upper class white people who are who are full of white guilt.

And the way they assuage the guilt is going and buying. Robin Danglers book.

I love because she she really wants you to walk in every room as a white person and apologize for the racism that you've perpetrated and that's been perpetrated by your race.

And then if you say anything mildly offensive and God knows what that is in today's day and age, basically anything, anything said by a white person, you're just offensive. Just you're walking around offensive.

She wants you to say, and I quote, Would you be willing to grant me the opportunity to repair the racism I perpetrated toward you?

Can you imagine if people actually behave like this or this is the shit that you like? Jonathan Capehart was saying you made him cry. I finally acknowledged his lifetime experience of being a victim over and over and over.

And you've got conservative black people saying you've got to be fucking kidding me.

It's just that the divide. And yet it's working. It's working. She is scared the daylights out of the media. Corporate America has taken the knee on this. I mean, like they're giving out free copies of this book. And also every Mexican decide to be an anti racist.

Yeah. And look, I actually agree that there are a lot of these companies do have racial issues, and they some of them really need to do do some things to fix. You know, there aren't enough black executives at some of these companies. Right. Like I agree with in Hollywood or in Hollywood and.

There are issues that have to be dealt with here, but this this is not the way to get there is to hire these high priced consultants who who probably in their day to day lives, never interact with black people. And I think that's abundantly clear from these books. That's not the way that we're going to get to the promised land. I don't think is is quite well.

But it's scary because not only might your corporation make you read this book, but as you point out, it reflects the orthodoxy of academia.

It's certainly at the college level, but also before then and I just think we're raising we're trying to create racists where they don't exist.

You know, if you right now, the messaging is basically if you're white, you have a black friend and you're enjoying each other and you're getting along. That's because you're a racist.

Right. Yeah. If you're just thinking you're having a good time with your friend, that's your racism speaking. That's where we are.

Yeah. There's a lot of very strange messaging. I don't I don't understand that. I worry about my kids. It's so funny because having kids really disabuse you of a lot of notions about race because you see little children playing with each other and they just don't they have no conception of race. It's just not important to them at all. But as they get older, we're filling their head. We're the people who are filling their heads with negative ideas, but with about race.

And that's what I worry about, is that there's you know, we're taking away the natural joy that kids have around each other and replacing it with something that's worse now.

Now, me too. I worry about it because it's like I don't I don't want my kids shamed. And while they're still in the single digits, mind you, for being white, but then when you start to have a conversation about, you know, the other side to that conversation, you're like, you're not bad just because you're white, you and your black friends are equal. And you should be like then you're on a subject that you just didn't want to discuss with your kid at this age.

You know, it's like suddenly you are you're part of the problem because you're making it an issue when it wasn't otherwise. You see your kids come up, they they'll describe they'll say like she has brown eyes, brown skin, brown hair. They don't even know that racist. That race is a thing that might be extra sensitive versus eye color. But we we make them know the schools, make them know.

And then it places parents in this position to have very nuanced, complex discussions on race that I just don't think these kids need when they're seven.

Yeah. And and kids are incredibly perceptive. And they they pick up on things like people becoming nervous or tensing up when they have to talk about an issue like race, which is which is not the message I think you would hope that they would send. You know, I always think about when I was growing up watching Sesame Street. Right. Which which presented this image of kind of racial harmony and equality that I thought was really beautiful and positive and but without, you know, kind of shoving it in your face, you know, and I think that's that's the kind of thing that's not we're not seeing so much anymore.

Like, we're we're trying to get the kids to think about things that maybe they don't need to when they're that young.

Well, that's just your racism talking. But thank you anyway. And yeah, you you don't like, instill culture. You you know, obviously we've talked about that.

I wondered what did you think about you must have been at Rolling Stone when they had the whole Virginia fake gang rape scandal. Yes.

I actually wasn't there. I had briefly left the company for like eight months. So I missed that whole thing, although a lot of my lucky you were were involved with with that story. So, you know, I can't ask you your thoughts.

Now, here's your thoughts. I just I'm sure the audience generally remembers this, but Rolling Stone had this big exclusive on UVA. University of Virginia woman came out and said she'd been gang raped at a fraternity party there and everyone ran with it. It was horrible. This poor woman, it turned out to be made up. It was another big story. And Rolling Stone had egg on its face and people started to question like, why are we doing this?

Why are we running with any story in which somebody, a woman says she's been victimized by a man or a black person, says they've been victimized by a white person? Hello, Jesse Smollett. Like we keep making the same mistake over and over. And do you think it's all tied in like that?

The need, the need to affirm the alleged victimization of anyone in a protected class.

So that's a it's a difficult question. What happened at Rolling Stone was and just just to preface it so that people understand, you know, I worked there for probably a decade before that happened.

And I had I had actually become exhausted by the fact checking process. I was. Probably spending more time fact checking on my articles about Wall Street than I was writing those pieces, the we had a very we were one of the last news organizations in New York that had a pretty sizable fact checking department that went through every single line. And so when this happened, I was really shocked because it was seemed impossible to me that it could have gotten through the department.

But what it turns out what happened was the source in the story didn't want to be fact checked in the traditional way. It didn't want to have to answer those questions.

And for a variety of reasons that I think a lot of those editors, you know, regret looking back on on the situation, they kind of turned off the usual fact checking process. And I think they thought they were being sensitive to the victim in the case or the ostensible victim.

But in reality, you're not being sensitive and you're not helping people in that position by not vigorously fact checking them, because you end up putting them in an even worse position by publishing something that's not true. And they become and for the rest of their lives, that follows them around and it becomes it becomes this thing that that's going to define their lives. So I think there's a there's a little problem in the journalism business where, you know, you're in in the in this new culture, we're kind of trained to believe the victim.

Right. And I understand that. But you can't take away the rigorous fact checking process because that actually doesn't help them in addition to being, you know, terrible, obviously, for the person who's accused, it doesn't help anybody to turn off that that process.

No, it's it's it's one thing if you do an interview with someone who says they're a victim and you ask tough questions and you probe the story and you present it to the audience as saying, this is this person's allegation and here is what the defendant has said, or the person being accused has said, if you if you are open about the fact that you've you've gotten this interview, you're going to tell the audience what you know. The person has to say that you reach out to the other side to give them the chance to respond.

That's one thing.

But to do an in-depth expose of a story which is presented very clearly as the story, this is what happened is a totally different ballgame. And geez, you have to be so careful, you know, and even now, you know, the news media has a way of reporting these things and telegraphing their belief.

That's what happened with Jesse Smollett before they know what's happened. You know, you look back on the initial reports about him, you guys know who he is. He's the guy who made up the fact that he had been attacked by two to guys who with a rope that they attacked. They I can't remember the details of how he said he was attacked, but it was a racial attack by two Magga hat wearing guys. And at two a.m. in Chicago, in the middle of the the cold storm, you know, the the deep freeze that they went through, it was baloney.

And the police came out very clearly and said not only did he hurt himself, but he hurt every real victim of racial attacks, of hate crimes, because now people are they're less likely to believe them then that's that that's the woman's real crime in the UVA case, is it's I don't really care that she has to deal with this following her around for the rest of her life. But I do care that now legitimate victims of sexual assault are going to have to overcome her lies in in being believed.

No, no one deserves a presumption of the truth, not knowing. Some women lie, some black people lie. Every person on Earth lies sometimes in our job as journalists.

Just try to get to the facts straight.

Yeah, you're right, it's ultimately the people who are going to suffer most from an error like that are the are the people who are who have real stories to tell, who are not going to believe the next time. I mean, another another example of that phenomenon that was really amazing was the the caliphate podcast by The New York Times. Oh, yeah.

Where they said this was recent, where they had a six part series that was based around a guy who claimed that he, you know, he joined the ISIS army in Syria and was doing all these crazy things like crucifying people and stabbing them to death. And it turned out to be you know, he was arrested for hoaxing in Canada.

And The Times just didn't check the story enough, you know, which allow a while ago would have been a significant scandal in the media business.

But, you know, now it is it's like a two minute story because this happens so often. No. Are a couple more questions with you about where you are. So you are so ready for Rolling Stone, but you're on substract now. So why why go there?

And is it a question of Rolling Stone not not wanting you to express your full opinions like we saw with Andrew Sullivan?

No, I've always had a lot of freedom at Rolling Stone, and they've I've always had a good relationship with the people there. That's really not it. So much as I kind of think saw the direction of where the business was heading.

I was a huge fan of I.F. Stone growing up, and he was a reporter who basically put out a newsletter out of his basement and reached a lot of people. And I just thought that this kind of subscriber based journalistic model might be a little liberating in some way. And my and also, you know, because Rolling Stone, I obviously get along with them, but they you know, if you read their content now, it's it was very, very heavily like pro Biden and pro Democrat during the last couple of years.

And, you know, I did feel a little bit of tension there, maybe because I'm more or less apolitical in my approach to the job. So I thought this would be a better choice. And you've done very well there, right, a minute that people use you as an example of the future of media, because what I read in the papers is you tripled your income just by going direct to consumer. Is that true? Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, that's that's probably true.

Yes. And I think people like Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Greenwald will tell you the same thing, that that subsidy is a model that can work for certain people. I think you have to have some profile already before you make that move. But and so I don't know that it's going to be a solution for, you know, to support the entire independent media. But it definitely works. And and there's a lot there's a huge audience out. There are people who are just kind of tired of the old thing.

So I strongly encourage anyone who's thinking about making this move to not be afraid to do it because it does work.

Do you worry about big tech cracking down, that's there's some yes musings right now publicly that that's going to be the next place they go, that suddenly you are accountable because big tech is going to say, I didn't like that article and you're your deep platformed.

Yeah, I'm very worried about that. I mean, substory is a service that is kind of designed to circumvent that because the your primary means of getting the material to your audience is by email. So once you have a list of stuff, a list of subscribers, you're just sending them personal notes, basically. So even if they even if I were to be taken off, you know, say Twitter or Facebook, I could still reach my audience. But I am really worried about that because clearly the things that I write could easily be censored in the same way that a lot of other people are being censored these days.

It's like you got to own it. That's why that's why I wanted to own Devil May Care me. I didn't I didn't want anybody else's money. I didn't want to partner with anybody. I use RedZone Ventures just to sort of get the show on the air because I don't know how to do that. But I'm the boss and it's my dough and no one can fire me and.

Right.

Like, if somebody cancels you out, I'll publish you.

I just feel like that's my dream.

It's just like I hate I hate what's happening and screw big tech and screw all these people who are trying to censor legitimate journalists and thought leaders from having a contrarian viewpoint. It has to stop.

You know, if we don't stand up and fight, then no one will. And and the audience is so ill served by this monolithic voice, which, by the way, we just saw that the country split right down the middle. You know, it's seventy four million, 71 million to Biden. Trump, it's split right down the middle. And there there is not uniformity of viewpoint in the United States. And the media should reflect that.

Absolutely. And, you know, the media also should be very, very worried about speech restrictions. And they're not at all, which really, really freaks me out. You know, I wrote an article before the election talking about how I I didn't particularly feel like voting for either candidate. And the original headline I had for that piece was going to be Vote for neither.

But I I didn't do that because I knew that that would have triggered a response from probably Twitter, which has a rule against any kind of material that might be seen as suppressing the vote. So there's all these new rules that you have to worry about when you're when you're doing the stuff now and you never know when they're going to decide to, you know, to take you off their site or to poor to suspend you or to to to block your content or to do what they did to the New York Post and lock your Twitter account.

I mean, that that stuff is scary. It's very Orwellian.

You said earlier that you normally never said who you like, what your political leanings were, and tried to just keep the vest up on that and that.

Now, you don't think that's realistic and your approach is changing. How so and why?

Well, I still try to do that, but but the problem is in the modern landscape, they're pushing you to be more and more open about what your political leanings are.

So there you don't see very many people in the traditional mainstream media who about whose politics you don't have an idea like you pretty much know who everybody's voting for.

Right. I mean, can you think of a major journalistic figure whose vote was a mystery? You know, in the recent cycle, there aren't that many. And it used to be not true. It used to be considered a virtue to if the audience didn't know anything about your personal life or your personal politics, the reason you want to you want to stay a little bit of a mystery to your readers is because it may at some point become necessary to criticize, you know, this or that political party.

And if if you've already publicly declared yourself to be on their side about things, it makes it harder to do that. So I always try to stay a little bit coy about that. And if I have to say something nasty about a politician, well, that's OK, because, you know, I haven't already announced myself loose.

And and to the contrary point, if you say I'm for Biden and I'm and I'm against Trump, I'm I'm for Trump and I'm against Biden or whatever, if you say something nasty about the other side, it means less. Right, because because you've already declared yourself to be a partisan. So I think there's a lot of value in trying to to hide a little bit from from the audience and just just just make observations and how people judge them on the merits.

I mean, I, I find it interesting, of course, because this is been my own history. You know, I'll challenge anyone you put in front of me. I don't really care whether they have a D or an hour next to their name.

And I have a proven history of that. But what I found in my past is that I will say it's more with the left. They find it very frustrating. They really want you to tell them that you're on their team and I'm not on their team. I'm not on the Republicans team either. And I never have you know, I'm not a registered Republican, nor am I rooting for anybody because they're a Republican.

I've been pretty open about the fact that I have I've sent out right leanings, but I have some things on the center left that I'm more aligned with as well.

And that is as much as I'll say, because that's what's true for me.

Being fair is easy because it's just my natural ideology. Like, I'm open minded and I want to be convinced either way.

I but I do think about it, you know, I know, for example, Lester Holt is a Republican, but I have no problem with seeing him anchor a debate involving a Republican cause I think he's fair. But I know, of course, that like Don Lemon. Is it is it it's just a, you know, die hard progressive. He's a leftist. And I would never want to see him anchor a presidential debate because there's zero chance he would be fair to the Republican.

And I feel like I don't know. I mean, I obviously have anchored five presidential debates. They're all Republican primaries. But I've, of course, got no problem throwing punches at Republicans. I just wonder what the future of the of the industry looks like now that I do, because I think I agree with you. More and more people are having to declare where they stand. And does it disqualify more and more journalists from staying in the fray?

I hope not, because I think with more of us having columns, having podcasts like I have here, you have to have that authentic connection with your audience. And you have to be honest about how you see the news. That's why they're coming to you for news, commentary, more and more. And I don't think it should disqualify you from journalism, from hard hitting journalism.

Absolutely. Yeah. I agree with you. And the you know, the last thing I'll say about that is the press derives all of its institutional power from the perception that it's separate from politicians and that and every time it announces itself as being in the fold with a political party, it loses power. So I don't know why people do that voluntarily. You know, you should you should try to retain as much influence as you can. And in order to do that, you have to be you have to be above the fray and like fair and willing to go after both both groups.

They can't help themselves. They don't mean to openly declare it. It's just their their news coverage betrays them. They're not above the fray. They are the fray in the fray. That could be the name of Brian Stelter, his next book.

Matt, it's a pleasure.

I hope I get to meet you in person sometimes. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, after the pandemic, we should do that.

That's right. Well, thank you for being here. Thanks so much for having me. Take care of the best.

Our thanks again to Matt Taibbi, who is a great guest with great insights. Before we go, I want to tell you that today's episode was brought to you in part by super soft shoes. Take two delicious chews a day for the health support and energy you need. Get yours today at Super Beats Dotcom again, N.K., while I have your attention, would love for you to subscribe to the show if you want to go down.

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I saw a couple of old friends in there, my old pal from Jones Day, where I used to practice law. Patti Carol saw your note. Thank you, lady. Miss you. And a guy I used to have on the Kelly file all the time, Dennis Michael Lynch wrote in. Does anybody remember him from the Kelly file? He was he was so good. He he'd have his camera. He'd go out there and he sort of happenings at the border.

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