So everyone's mad that, and even some Democrats, I think, are mad about these last minute Biden pardons of Fauci and the j 6 committee, etcetera, etcetera. So let's just set that aside. My concern is not that these people are punished. Fauci is 81.

Yeah. Who cares?

I think he'll be punished. Yeah. You know, in some larger sense. But I wanna know what they did. That's the okay.

So can we just go through a couple of these and, like, why would you pardon Fauci? What are the potential crimes, the crimes you think he committed and could be punished for that you're trying to prevent him from being punished for by pardoning him?

Well, with Fauci specifically, the the 1 thing that comes to mind, immediately is perjury

Yes.

Because he's been accused of that essentially already by, you know, the House Committee.

Lying under oath to the Congress.

Lying under oath to to the Congress. In particular, saying, you know, that we have we have never funded gain of research, that that we weren't doing it during this time period. Even as as there are other people in the government, like, you know, the deputy director of the NIH, saying, yes, we were. Or Ralph Barrick, who was 1 of the scientists that, UNC saying, yes, absolutely. That was a gain of function.

Yeah. So there's a little bit of a problem there. Now he later amended the statement, and said that he was speaking in a specific way, under a specific definition, but there's exposure there. But that's that's not really the issue with Fauci. The issue

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The issue is, really it's about the whole rat's nest of gain of function. How much did the authorities know about what was going on at the Wuhan Institute? Did they have human sources at the Wuhan Institute? Did they was there advanced warning that this was coming? Were they, suppressing investigations into the possibility of a lab leak, because of the connections to US research.

All that stuff is in play. I mean, there there's there's a lot of stuff that's going on, that, you know, that you wanna know. So Fauci was part

of The US bioweapons program, obviously. Right? I mean, if you're funding gain of function, it's, you know, vaccines are 1 part of that, but probably not the only part of it. Right? So the idea is you make the virus more dangerous in order to create a vaccine to fight the virus.

Right. That's But

in the process, you wind up with much more dangerous viruses.

Right. And that's 1 of the things that that, raised a red flag for some of the people who were looking, at the COVID phenomenon is just look at the surface characteristics of the disease. It's highly transmissible. Yes. It doesn't it's not terribly symptomatic.

Everybody's gonna get it. Not everybody's gonna be harmed by it. It's kind it's what they designed, what you would do if you were designing a disease to carry a vaccine, for instance.

Yes. Yeah. So my interest is not in Fauci. I think any normal person can make up his mind about Fauci. It's pretty obvious who Fauci is the super bureaucrat.

It's in the bioweapon programs and the Frankenstein science that's being funded by our tax dollars around the world, to be specific, in Ukraine, in China, in Djibouti, and we have bio labs in a lot of places around the world and, like, what are they doing?

What are they doing? What was their relation to to the Wuhan Institute also? I mean, I think those are all important questions. So both the bioweapons and, you know, their their relation to the to the pandemic. But the the thing is about these pardons, they're a mistake.

If you wanna know what's happening, they just made it a lot easier for us to find out. Because now, once the pardon's, delivered, the person can't plead the fifth. If they're brought before a grand jury, they can't take the fifth anymore. Or if they're brought before a congressional committee, they, they can't evoke their right against self incrimination. So they have to say something.

And this is what's so interesting because I've been talking to, criminal defense attorneys, people who are former Senate investigators, some current Senate investigators, and they all kind of said the same thing. It's so illogical to give somebody a pardon if you're trying to cover up, things that the only reason you would really do it is if there's very serious crimes involved. Right? So that's a red flag for us. When we see somebody getting getting a pardon, we think, well, why would they do that unless there's something really bad there?

Right? So, either it's a mistake where they just stupidly made it easier for everybody to investigate or there's something we don't know about that is interesting.

Well, it's such a profound thing to do. I mean, I if somebody said to you, Matt, would you accept a pardon? You would say, well, why would I just why would I need a pardon? No. I mean, it's like, it's it's incriminating.

It's morally incriminating or it has the appearance of moral incrimination just by its fact. Right?

It's not only morally incriminating, it's legally incriminating as the Department of Justice itself said in a memo, I think, on 1 of the J 6 cases, it said, this does not unring the bell of conviction if you get a, a pardon going forward. So you're making an admission if you accept the pardon. So yeah, I wouldn't accept 1 if I were totally innocent. Well, of course. Yeah.

And also I wouldn't accept 1 if I had something to hide because now, you know, if I'm dragged before a congressional committee or especially a grand jury investigation, now I can't tap out and say, yeah, I'm sorry. I'm gonna take the fifth on that.

That's fascinating.

Right? So it the the whole thing is really illogical. I mean, I think it was more meant to be a symbolic gesture. And this is really, I think, speaks to the thinking of the Biden administration about so many things, right? They were so driven by optics with Trump that they did so much.

They did a lot of things that were incredibly stupid. So they want to portray him as vengeful and out to get people. And the the pardons are a good way to do that. I mean, if you're aiming for that audience, but it had the negative effect of of opening all these investigations up, it seems to me.

So you really think this was aimed at MSNBC viewers just to paint Trump as a vindictive person?

So I asked a lot of people, why did they do this? Like, what's the point? And 1 of the theories was that, that this is messaging. That they were trying to create a headline. And there were lots of headlines instantaneously if you saw them.

They all basically said the same thing, like, you know, to ward off future vindictive retaliatory acts by the Trump administration, you know, Biden issues pardons. It's always after the comma, right? Yeah. That's 1 theory. The other theory is that, in the last days of a presidential administration, it gets pretty chaotic in the White House and people who want things and, you know, they will come in and there will be a hurried frenzy to put stuff on paper.

And that's why there are unprecedented things in these pardons. For instance, the J 6 pardons, this has never happened before where you give a pardon to a category of unnamed people. Right? It says to the members of the committee, to the Capitol police officers who testified, to the staff, but it doesn't delineate the names of the people who are pardoned. So now, if you want to invoke your pardon, you actually have to, go over, a test to prove that you're actually part of that category that I testified before the committee.

Does that mean that the committee called you, that that you talked to a staffer once? Or does that mean you actually sat in front of the hall and testified? It's very weird. And the only explanation that I could come up with from people is that they were in a hurry. They didn't have all the names.

It's amazing. Right? So but how why would you preemptively pardon the j 6 committee? I mean, that's, like, the single most legitimate, morally empowered, great group of people ever impaneled in this country.

Like, truly. Well, I mean, there are obviously some theories about why they would do that. Right?

Mother Teresa, she was such a great person, we're gonna preemptively pardon them. Like, what? This is, like, crazy.

No. It it is absolutely crazy. And, if I were some of those people, I'd be offended. Yes. Especially the people who who testified and who didn't, lie under oath.

Yes. For instance. Right? Because they're all named. Yeah.

All the police officers who testified, to the committee. Now, what if they're only really trying to protect a couple of them? And there are some very conspicuous names. I think we know who they are. Right.

Yeah, exactly.

The ones they're trying to protect.

Right. But what if you're 1 of the other ones who just who just gave some testimony?

They I mean, they interviewed hundreds and probably thousands of people. Right?

Yeah. I I it's some number like that.

Massive, massive number. And I assume most of them told the truth. I mean Right. Right. Most people do tell the truth, actually, I think.

I think that's probably the case. Yeah. I mean, especially if you're under oath and you're a law enforcement officer. I mean, it's a very serious thing to to lie in those situations. And, you know, there there are a couple of places in the testimony where it doesn't look good for some of the people who who testified.

But for the vast majority of them, I would take it as a grievous insult to be given that pardon and especially to not be named. That that's what's so weird about it.

But it suggests what I have thought from the first week, which is they're, like, serious crimes here. I mean, you talked to Steve Sund, you know, ran Capitol Police, who's, like, a nonpolitical person, just career law enforcement, former MP, you know, former Washington DC cop. I don't think he has any weird agenda. He I mean, his story is so unbelievable. They just didn't give him any intel at all and didn't give him any resources, and everybody else knew this was happening except him.

I mean, the whole thing is so nuts that you're like, wait. There's something going on here. I don't really know. And the the pipe bombs at the

The pipe bombs, the gallows that was erected by some weird unknown group the night before.

Will we ever get disclosure? I guess that's what I want. I just wanna know. I again, I'm not I am not French. Well, I don't really wanna punish people so much as I just wanna know that feels like punishment enough.

Will we?

I think we will. I think we're we're heading into a golden age for investigative journalism. I think this is after 8 years of crazy misleading news stories and dead ends and unanswered questions and fake news, you know, ranging from Russiagate to Nord Stream, to, you know, the COVID origins where we're actively kept away from 1 side of that story for years. I think we're gonna find out a lot of this stuff. There, there are investigations already underway, document hunts going on all over the place.

There are reports that have been commissioned, to look into a lot of these questions, and they're gonna be staffed up with a lot of money and a lot of personnel. And it's just an unprecedented situation where, for instance, the DHS or the FBI or the DOJ would be in sync with congressional investigators to the point where they're not gonna have to issue subpoenas for a lot of this stuff. They're just gonna sit down and say, here's a list of the documents we wanna find. And I think that they're gonna have that collaborative arrangement. Incredible.

There's panic. I sense panic. And I sense it, in some of these confirmation battles, particularly the sort of offline stuff that you don't see in the media, but just when you find out the lengths to which permanent Washington is going to say sabotage Tulsi Gabbard. It was an army officer who's had a clearance for more than a decade, carries an automatic weapon. I mean, clearly, we trust her with America's, you know, defense.

Why can't we trust her with America's secrets? Of course, we can. So what is this? And it really is people are panicked that what they've been doing is gonna come to light, I think.

Well, they should be panicked because if you read the executive order on the weaponization of government, it specifically empowers the director of national intelligence, to conduct a wide ranging report into the possible misdeeds of the entire intelligence community and orders her to come up with, you know, anything negative that they can find. So can you imagine? No. Right? I mean, that that's like trying to make a list of everything.

You you she'll be doing it from now till the end of time. But no, I mean, the to in perfect seriousness, this is it's setting the stage for, you know, kind of a second church committee hearings, era. And that was a great moment in American history.

Once every 50 years. Right. We find out what they're doing

with their black budgets. Yeah. And really, in in the who would have known, right, that we were doing such an incredibly wide ranging, you know, list of horrible, stupid things from, you know, trying

to Yes.

Murder Castro with exploding seashells to spying on Martin Luther King Junior to trying to, you know, leak news about mistresses of civil rights leaders. I mean, it goes the list went on and on and on. And we only found out about it because they went too far. Right. And now suddenly people in the Senate had a hammer, to start looking, you know, into this direction and it all came out.

Well, not all of it, but a lot of it came out.

A lot of it. Frank Church sadly got incredibly fast developing cancer, I noticed.

Did he?

Yes. He did. He did kind of like Jack Ruby style cancer, Hugo Chavez style cancer. It's interesting. Uh-huh.

Did not know.

Couldn't yeah. Couldn't treat it. He died. Sad.

Sorry. No. It's alright. I mean, look, it's hard not to think. I I never thought this way until, like, a a year ago.

I mean, a year and a half ago.

I'm like, oh, now I did not think this way. I I attacked anyone who did. Right. Yeah. But I can I say 1 thing that I've noticed now that I'm in middle age, is that all my life, the older guys I've known, like, you go on duck hunting trips or whatever in in Washington where I live, like, with my dad and his friends or whatever?

And the guys who are in their fifties and sixties all thought this way. They all thought this way, you know, after, like, a lifetime of government service as an operations officer or whatever you're doing. Right?

Right. Right.

They all had this mindset. I remember sitting, like, in a duck blind thinking, these guys are fucking crazy. They're all nuts. What I didn't realize was there's a reason that people become more open to these sorts of explanations the more they see.

Of course. And maybe right? Yeah. I don't

know why I didn't get that.

Yeah. Well, I it's probably just our generation that thought the Schoolhouse Rock thing was true. I mean, right?

It's so true.

Because, you know, we we we grew up with all the president's men and after the church commute. So we thought it all had come out. The good guys won. There's transparency. We have the freedom of information act.

We can find everything out. No. Right? It turns out no. Right?

No. You're I never thought of Schoolhouse Rock and all the president's men is sophisticated propaganda put there by the intel agencies, but I think you're right.

Whether they're whoever did it, it was effective.

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So can we just go through since I Sure. Think you're as I've said many times that I mean it, I think you're 1 of the great reporters still working. Not that there are many not there's a ton of competition. Yeah. There

there aren't many. But,

and and and you are, by your nature, a curious person, which is, like, requirement 1 for journalism. And, like, the 1 thing no 1 else seems curious about, I think, but you are. So can you just just go through in no particular order the stories whose endings you'd like to know? Like, what are you curious about as we enter an age of disclosure, God willing we do? What do you wanna know?

So first of all, just to back up, I tried to make a list a couple of days ago. Oh, did you really? Yeah. Of all the things that I would wanna investigate if I were, you know, in in that kind of a position to order these countries. I'm actually

gonna take notes as you talk. Because I I because I I'm gonna follow along at home as this happens. Okay.

But, I I couldn't finish. There were so many different things that I never got to the end, but I I would say that the big ones, you know, there are huge glaring questions, which is unusual. For instance, who who was president the last 4 years, especially the last year? I mean, I think that's an enormous question.

Kinda blinking.

Do you think it was blinking?

You know, I I think blinking's so evil, so demonstrably evil and also stupid that I just see his fingerprints everywhere. Right. Right. But I that's pure guess.

That's that's the problem. We don't really know.

That in the last 2 months, Blinken did everything he could to accelerate the war between The United States and Russia, which is, like, I should be illegal. I don't know how he got away with that. Nobody said anything about it, but that's a fact.

So, anyway, sorry to interrupt. He and and he, you know, the his state department was also involved in the censorship stuff too. So,

Who was president?

Who or what?

Who was president? Like start with a big question. Yeah.

No. I mean, I think of all the crimes that are on the table and the potential corruption issues, people signing documents or somehow getting documents signed by an incompetent president or an unfit president has to rank up there with the most serious things that have ever happened in, in American history. Right? So you have to look at what were the, what was the process of the White House operation? Right.

Who was actually running things? We know from a surface point who was who held the posts. Right? So Ron Klain was the the chief of staff. We know roughly who else was in Joe Biden's orbit.

What what were the what was the schedule? You know, did he did he sign things by auto pen? Because they have this this machine that does, and, and who, and who was, who basically had the power of attorney to turn that on? Right? Like, these are all questions that we have to get answers to.

What was the day to day operation of the Biden White House? And again, especially in the last year, because I think, you know, that gets to bigger questions of who was really making these big foreign policy decisions and who was making decisions about things like, you know, cutting off the democratic primaries to challengers, you know, right? These are big party decisions, not necessarily White House decisions. Who decided to kick Biden off the ticket. Biden on July 13, was giving a speech in Detroit and he's like, I'm running.

I mean, he couldn't have been more, affirmative about the idea that he was not going to drop out of the race. Within 7 days, he was out of the race. Within 3 days after that Detroit thing, there were stories leaked out in Politico that were basically saying that Nancy Pelosi was going to ask him to or going to try to pressure him to drop out. But I don't believe that. I think we need to find out exactly what those communications were.

I mean, who had the authority to push the president of The United States off his own ticket? Unless he had a sudden change of heart. Do you believe that?

I think it's really obvious that his statement dropping out on Twitter was issued before he knew. I mean, I I've heard that again. I don't know is the truth. But, I've heard that.

It's very conspicuous that when he when he wanted to say things, he said it on camera. But there were all kinds of things where the wording was much more careful and that was done on Twitter or in a letter or in a press release. I mean, even even the the note explaining the pardons who wrote that. Right. It was on the, you know, Biden's Twitter account.

I doubt he's sitting there tweeting.

So it's just a coup. I mean, that's a coup. If you take a sitting president of The United States and force him to drop out I mean, right?

It it's on the table. It has to be, because, you know, Jill Biden has been very circumspect in in talking about it. She's said these really curious things about how she wants to reevaluate her relationships. I think she she was referring to Nancy Pelosi. But what exactly happened, in, in that 1 week period between, you know, the July, and the or so?

And then what happened in, between the and the or whenever it was when Biden suddenly came out and and made Kamala the nominee. Like, how did that happen? Who made that decision?

So that was after the Republican convention?

Yes. Yes. So you

had this incredible week or 2 where Trump gets shot, survives, you have the convention, and Biden drops out. I mean, that's and as far as I know, I don't think anyone's ever done, like, a real TikTok on that.

No. There were there were stories, but they were incredibly incomplete. And this is 1 of the things where, you know, I was looking at it even from just a professionalism point of view in terms of the New York Times, the Washington Post, all of these these papers. How does nobody ask who made the decision to nominate, Kamala Harris? How did that happen?

How was he kicked off? Or how did he come come to that decision? Normally, there would be a big show of that. Right? There would be somebody would come out and give an interview, to, I don't know, 60 minutes and say, well, here's how that happened.

Right? And whether it was true or not, there would be a grand explanation. Whenever there's something big that happens with the president. Here, they just they just kind of did a little tweet or a press release, and there were things that were leaked out in newspapers. None of it made any sense.

So I, you know, they have to get all those communications. And I think that's what was important there. You know, there were preservation letters that were sent out by some senate committees. I hope it captured a lot of this stuff, but we'll see. You know?

Do you, have any sense of what the answer is to either 1 of these questions? Who is functionally operating the Biden administration and who kicked Biden out? Who made these decisions?

I've only heard theories about this. Right? And and that's the problem. It it's kinda irresponsible for reporters to speculate because

I agree.

We don't know. All we know, we we we saw little bits and pieces of things. Like there was the, there was a really weird moment. You might remember when, Biden said something to the effect of we can't allow Putin to stay in office or whatever it was. Right.

And, and people immediately interpreted that as a regime change.

Of course.

Right. 47 minutes later, the White House comes out with a walk back clarifying statement saying, you know, our, our policy towards Russia is unchanged or something, something ambiguous like that. But there were leaks in the press about what happened there. And there was a remarkable line in 1 of those stories saying that Biden was allowed to participate in the workshopping of that second statement. How is he not in charge of it?

First of all, right? Like, and, and, you know, there's like talking about Jake Sullivan is, is, involved in the process, but that just gives you a little glimpse into this idea of a collective presidency where at best Biden was a participant. So I think we need to know, a lot of things about who was actually making those decisions. It might be different in terms of, you know, for each realm of the government, right? Maybe the national security questions were dealt with by 1 person then, you know, the foreign policy things by another.

I I don't know. I mean, we'll see.

And then domestic policy, which doesn't even really exist in this country. It's all national security, like, runs everything.

Right. Right.

Who's doing that? Yeah.

Oh, that was only the first thing in the list. Right? The No.

You just got you know, it's so funny as you say this, and I won't interrupt you anymore, but I just can't. I mean, it's, like, crazy you're going through this stuff. This just happened this summer. Yeah. And I was there.

I mean, I know a lot of the people. I feel like I'm not that informed, but maybe more informed than average because it's my job. I kinda forgot about all this stuff. Like, so much stuff has happened. It's like it's amazing Yeah.

What we have allowed to sort of pass by us without demanding answers.

I mean, I remember being in Russia in the There were multiple, episodes that you might classify as quasi coups. Yes. Right? There were there was an, an episode where people tried to arrest Yeltsin's bodyguard, Alexander Karshakov, and it kind of turned out the other way in the end. And but there was, intense reporting about this by the supposedly unfree Russian press at the time.

And then there was also the whole question of, you know, why was Putin brought in? You know, what did he do when he immediately he was immediately kind of used to, clamp down on the an investigation of Yeltsin that was done by the general prosecutor at the time. I mean, that's all in the weeds. What I'm trying to say is even in a third world country, we got more information, about stuff that was going on than we got last year in The United States Of America, where we had a gigantic press corps sitting in Washington supposedly covering all this stuff. I I it it blows my mind.

Do you

know I mean, you've done this your whole life, so you know and you grew up in it. So you you must still know people in that gigantic press corps.

A few, but, you know, the ones that I that I I'm still in touch with mostly have been kind of squeezed out. You know, there are people who who did try to get to the bottom of what happened. I mean, Cy Hersh did a a story about the mechanics of how it got to be went from Biden to Kamala. And, you know, that story came out on Substack, but it wasn't picked up anywhere.

No.

And that's kind of the way the media works.

Psynerg also broke the story that The United States, NATO, the Biden administration was behind the sabotage of Nord Stream Right. Natural gas pipeline to Western Europe, to Germany. And

That I mean, that's on the list too, obviously. But that's

I mean, I I think we can say that's true. And, I mean, why isn't Cy Hirsch getting the Pulitzer for that? Why you know, he was immediately this guy's been a hero on the left for my entire life. Before before I was born, he was a hero on the on the left. And all of a sudden, everyone's like, shut up, Putin apologist.

Oh, I know. I know. I mean

I'm sorry. I'm you know all this. It just drives me insane. It drives me insane.

But not only

are there almost no good reporters left, the few good reporters left are, like, attacked all the time.

Yeah. They all they they've all been kicked to the curb. You know, it's I think it's very notable that a lot of the high profile investigative reporters just can't even publish in The United States. Oh, I know. You know?

And, you know, look at somebody like Jeff Girth, who, who writes, who, who made a point of kind of keeping ties to traditional media and not burning bridges and doing all that stuff and worked his, his butt off to get this 24000 word piece about Russiagate into the Columbia journalism review. And it should have landed hard. It should have landed like a Mike Tyson uppercut, you know, and it, it it people just ignored it. So even when they don't kick you out of the club, they just say they ignore

the hard reporting. For people who were, you know, 40 was definitely 1 of the most famous investigative reporters in the world and

feared. Yeah. The New York Times front page Worst.

Earth. Yeah. Big deal guy for many, many years.

He was the bulldog going after the Clinton administration on everything. Right? So, I mean, when he did a story, it mattered. It was on the desk of every Senator in the country. You know, and that that's, what's so interesting about this period is that there, there is none of that.

The stuff that lands on the desks of people in the relevant committees in Washington is PR. There's no reporting there for the most part. Maybe that will change now. I don't know. But, you know, I doubt it.

People read your stuff. I happen to know. So

Oh, that's that's good. That would be great to me.

They they do. Yeah. Yeah. So, okay.

But Nord Stream, don't forget to Okay.

Nord Stream. Let's go to Nord Stream. Nord Stream. Now I'm gonna stop interrupting Nord Stream. What do we know?

I mean

I mean, we know that there's 5 or 6 shifting official explanations of what happened. They eventually settled on this kind of labyrinthine the story about a rogue Ukrainian operation that apparently without our input, when, when did this, Yeah, I don't believe it. I mean, it's, it's, it's laughable to think that that's true. And so, you know, the but that's the kind of Nord Stream is just 1 it's like looking up at the stars in the sky. That's just 1 of them.

And that's a huge story. I mean, think about it.

That could've started the German economy. It will destroy the EU. Ultimately, when people wake up from their dream state, it will destroy NATO because it was an attack by 1 NATO power on a NATO ally. Another NATO member was attacked by The United States on Germany. So and it wrecked the German economy.

Absolutely. It strained and strained the incoming relations and and, it's it's just it could have resulted in, you know, an immediate nuclear escalation. I mean, there's so many different things. It was a massive ecological disaster. It's a deep water horizon level environmental event.

The greatest man made emission of carbon dioxide in history.

Right. And it's a tiny footnote to the insane lunacies that happened during this period. I'm sorry, but it is. Like Nord Stream is, if you're making a list of the 10 weirdest things that happened, in the last 8 years, it's probably at the bottom, I would think. I mean Wow.

I mean, don't you think? I mean, right I

think that's right. I just, you know, I like Western Europe. I think it's important to have a thriving Western Europe. I don't think they're a rival. I think they're a complimentary region to The United States.

And to see it destroyed intentionally by the Biden administration, well, let's just wreck Western Europe. Like, why would you do that? And I so I'm I'm fixated on it, but, but you're right. So what are the others?

So COVID? Okay. I mean, there there are there are so many different areas where they're gonna have to investigate reinvestigate that. We just went through a period where, you know, there was sort of mass stonewalling of, of Congress when it was trying to investigate what happened with COVID. You know, people, there were key people like Peter Dazsak from the eco health Alliance who just didn't answer subpoenas.

Right. And so we're going to have there are documents that we know exist that we're going to get now, you know, with FBI communications between the bureau and a lot of these scientists, you know, dating back 10 years. And it's going to tell a very, a crazy story. I mean, a really interesting story. There's a reason why Fauci's pardon is backdated to 2014, because that's the time period that they're going to be have to start looking, which is, you know, when did we start defying the ban on gain of function re research?

We clearly did. I think that's, I think that's pretty established at this point. Why were we doing it? What connection did that have to the Wuhan thing? What kind of advance notice did we get?

What kind of lies were told about it? Who were responsible for those lies? What information did we get about the inefficacy of the vaccine? And how did that connect to statements by the CDC and the White House? This also connects to the censorship issue in a major way because there was also, a sort of massive effort to control, public the public conversation about this, that went through the health agencies.

So we know they're looking at that. And that's another executive order, by the way, the free speech order, directs them, the the department of justice to come up with a comprehensive review of all the censorship stuff. So we're going to find out about that. But I just think COVID is a gigantic rat's nest of stuff. And, you know, it's gonna be like a turkey shoot where every direction they look, they're gonna find something, you know, revelatory.

The question is, will that information reach the public? Because there is the intermediaries, the media. So, like, congressional investigators, executive branch agencies like DOJ, you know, they they're constantly inspectors general, they're always releasing reports, and I'm like, no 1 reads them because nobody picks them up in the media. Do we have enough interested reporters to, like, disseminate what they find?

See, I think we do because I think that what we think of as the media is dead. It they no longer really matter. The the the media that matters now are people like you and and Joe Rogan and other, you know, there's podcasters out there. There's this independent, gigantic, thriving, independent media culture

that,

you know, turned the last election clearly. Yeah. It was also abundantly clear that the that the old media no longer had any ability to control the narrative about anything. They're totally discredited. So I I think this stuff is gonna come out and because it's gonna be so explosive, it's going to sort of solidify and heighten the prestige of all this new media.

I think we're probably gonna see whole institutions that are gonna be built around these disclosures. We're gonna have new newspapers, new new TV stations.

So do I normally save this for the end, but I'm feeling so enthusiastic. I'm a do it now in case people don't

get

to the end. Where do people find you? How do they support you if you've made it this far in this conversation, you're like, this guy's unbelievable. How did I'm sorry. Shamelessly promote for this

Oh, thanks. No. I'm at racket.news, on Substack where, a lot of these new sites are.

For those who didn't grow up playing squash, how are you spelling racket?

Racket.news. Right. So Racket.

So not not squash racket.

Not squash racket. Like racket. Like, that's a racket. You know, which this is. Yes.

It turned out to be aptly named. So, but yeah, no, I, I'm feeling very optimistic now. I think, there's, there are still some holes in this new media landscape. We don't have the huge institutions that have reporters who have beats, which I think is crucial. Right?

Because you need to have people who develop sources in 1 small area. Agree.

And Well, you saw that with Julie Kelly on Jan. 6. I don't even know what she did before. She's purely kind of a creation of the Internet. Well, she's a self creation, but she her medium was the Internet and x specifically.

And she just got mad about Jan. 6 and just relentlessly focused on that. I'm sure she has other opinions, but she only did that. And, I mean, man, this 1 woman in I think she's my age ish, like, unearthed all this information that was like, no no 1 else got it except her because she was just so focused on this thing.

Yeah. No. It it it's great. It's incredible. And it's that's exactly how the press is supposed to function.

They're not supposed to be credentialed. Like, it's not supposed to be a thing where, you know, somebody confers a title. You are the, the official media. No, the citizen, they're like, that's part of our job is, is to be the press, right? Like that's why the, the, the, the, for the first amendment was designed for exactly for that to happen.

And there were, there was lots of incredible reporting that was done, by either individuals or small indicate, you know, organizations like The US right to know, they filed, hundreds of FOIA requests on Fauci and gain of function and everything. And, they really started the ball rolling on that whole side of that investigation. It's, you know, it was a relatively small site. And they had good good young reporters there who were hungry, and that's how this thing works, you know?

Amazing. Right? Amazing. It's exciting. It's so exciting.

And it's also true that there are increasingly people making, like, a legit living. I'm not getting rich, but, like, paying the bills, doing this job.

Right. Which is important. And that's also how it's supposed to work.

Yes. I mean, I

I I remember hearing a story about Eye of Stone. When I was starting on subject substack, I was calling around to some of the old timers and saying like, is this a good idea for me to tap out of mainstream media? And they told me a story that and they said, you know, I have stone cranked out a newsletter for those people who don't know he was a, I see stone. He was, you know, 1 of the original, independent investigative journalists. He worked out of his house.

He put out this little newsletter, the I I have stone weekly. It was great, reporting independent. Didn't have to answer to editors who told him to shape things 1 way or the other. And he made a nice living, got himself a nice little house, and that was enough. Right?

And he had an impact. And you can do that now. The Internet makes it easier, actually.

It's amazing. Yeah. In America, we do things a little differently, and we always have. But the British said, hey. We're gonna tax your favorite morning beverage.

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Make the switch today. Pure Talk, America's wireless company. You wonder again, I'm I'm delaying you in your narrative once more. So with apologies. But you wonder, even just the 4 topics you've mentioned so far are so big that if we got the truth or some, you know, higher percentage of the truth about those things, you wonder about the social effect.

So 1 of the things the sensors always say is they're doing this or preventing you from knowing certain things to preserve societal stability.

Yeah. And trust in institutions.

Trust in institutions. Exactly. Trust in institutions. So, I mean, that's already gone away, but it will evaporate completely the more we know. Don't you think?

Yes. Yes. But it'll be like, I mean, hopefully, it'll be like the church committee hearings where, look, we just have to accept people are going to have their minds blown by discoveries, revelations. For instance, it's already starting in the news media. We're starting to get stories from journalists who were told they had to suppress certain angles.

Right? You know, there was a you know, political story about some people who were told to stay away from the the Hunter Biden laptop story.

2 political reporters having left political admitted that political, which is supposed to be covering Washington, told them no, we're not we're not doing that.

Right. Exactly. And, you know, my first question is why didn't you say that when it happened? But I guess people have jobs. Right?

So that's, that's a thing. But there are gonna be a lot more of those. I mean, and they're already kind of whispers or going around. But, people are going to learn that institutions they believed in their whole lives were fraudulent, that they lied to them about important things. And they're it's gonna be difficult at first, especially since there are not solid new institutions in place to replace them.

Yes. You know, it's 1 thing if you're taking down the CIA in the and there's a supposedly reformed CIA there. Right? This is different. The media is gonna have to re rebuild itself from the ground up.

I think it's already doing great, but it it it doesn't have that look for a lot of people. Right? It doesn't That's right. Yeah.

And It looks very different

for sure. And so, you know, it's gonna be as you yeah. I think that's a good point. It's a transitional period for people.

I I guess, look, if you want trust in institutions, and I definitely do. I do. I grew up trusting institutions. I don't now. That's their fault, not mine.

I think your country doesn't work if nobody trusts any of the institutions. Right? It just doesn't. So we want that. The only way to that is through transparency, honesty.

So I get all that, and I'm for it vehemently. I guess what I'm saying is the people who've been administering the system and benefiting from it are completely freaked out. Right? It's why they're trying to stop Tulsi. But I wonder if they get threatened enough if they don't become, like, just flat out dangerous to everybody else.

Like, the only way to stop disclosure at this point would would be with, like, a a catastrophe that's so all encompassing 09/11 that it just everything shuts down. All trends in progress stop. And I just feel like there's a lot at stake for these people. If you're, you know, John Brennan or Jim Clapper and you're like a criminal or Mike Pompeo, you're a criminal. That's my opinion, but I think they're obviously criminals.

Like, you know, you've got a lot to lose.

Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And and people in the intelligence agencies, whose names are not known to the public, they're about to be.

Exactly.

And, you know, that we don't know what that's gonna result in, what impact that's going to have.

Well, so this was my thinking about, you know, the the period between the election and the inauguration this week. I think that's 1 of the reasons that Tony Blinken was pushing so hard for a real war trying to kill Putin, for example, which the Biden administration did. They tried to kill Putin.

Really? Yes.

Yeah. Yes. They did. Wow. Which is insane if, like okay.

So who takes over Russia? Right. And what happens to nuclear arsenal in a country that's, like, so complex outsiders can't even understand? When you live there, you know. Like, that's demented that you would even think of something like that.

Absolutely.

So why were they? Because chaos is a screen that protects them. I mean, I don't know this. That's just, like, watching what they're doing. I'm like, why would they be doing that?

Part of it is because, like, it's it's like when you're taking off the roof of the embassy in Saigon, you burn all the papers. Right?

Absolutely.

But they can't because they're digital. So maybe you need, like, a war to hide your tracks.

In order to keep the public's attention

That's what it means.

Elsewhere. Right. Yes. Exactly. Yeah.

I I had the same fears, and that was part of my my thinking when they started, you know, approving the firing of American missiles into Russian territory and British missiles and French missiles. I'm like, why would you do like, what possible reason Yes. Would there be, to do this? You're not really gonna make any military gains by doing this. So it's you're doing it either to provoke the other side or to create a headline.

The headline, I don't think it gets you anything.

No.

So what were they doing? And, you know, if you're if as you're saying, there there were fiddling with regime change in the, in the interim. Yes. Yeah. I think that was a fear that a lot of people had.

I, I didn't think that frankly, that, Trump would become president. I thought I, you know, for a variety of different reasons, I I don't I don't know exactly what could have happened to stop that, but I I it was hard for me to accept that it did happen.

I I was sitting about 6 feet away, and I just thought, wow. I can't believe this has actually happened. Right. Up until the second he said the oath, I was like, man. You know?

I mean, I you just get superstitious or paranoid or whatever it is having seen all this stuff.

And I was embarrassed to have those

thoughts. I agree. I totally agree. I was like, wow. I'm becoming crazy.

Yeah. But it's not totally crazy when you see the pattern. So but I guess my the point I would make is it's like we're not the process has not unfolded fully yet. So, like, there's still a lot that we don't know disclosure is, as you've said, like, imminent, and that sets up an incentive for the people being exposed to

do something really crazy. It does. But the I I think the moment is past Good. For for the real that, like, there was a moment where they could have installed, you know, a European style regime to stop misinformation. This is, this is the new trend, right?

Remember the hurricanes happened and immediately FEMA is talking about setting up an anti misinformation center. Right. It just happened in California. That's fucking crazy. Right?

I mean, you know, the the fact that Gavin Newsom had time to try to come up with a state bureau for protecting my reputation. But, but they could really have done that. They, they could have basically put a net over everything, with, I mean, that that's the thing that's scary about the, the European situation is, is they already have that massive infrastructure in place to completely control the flow of information, what people see, what people don't see, that they can punish people who step out of line. And we were, you know, this far away from being part of something like that. And if they were gonna do that, if they had done that, and I think there, there was probably some thinking that that would have been accomplished by 2024.

If you go back and look at some of the European Union's papers on the subject, they were anticipating that we were going to be signatories to certain agreements, like the code of practice on disinformation that we would have our own version by now. If they had done that, then none of this would be possible. You know, all these independent outlets, they could scream to high heavens, but no 1 would would see it. It would be like, you know, No, it's totally right. Right.

I mean, you, you know this because you, when you were doing shows about COVID, well, now we can look behind the scenes and see that the White House was demanding that Facebook dial it down. They turned it down to 50%. I mean, that's in print. I I I mean, what did you think when you saw that, by the way, when the

I totally ignored it. I ignore all coverage that in any way pertains to me. I don't wanna become self conscious. So I didn't spend, you know, 1 second thinking about I've had a couple other things and 1 other thing in particular in the last year that was, like, so shocking. I never thought about it again because you just don't I I'm I'm sure you've been through this.

I mean, you were speaking of mistreated.

I'm

not gonna bring it up, but you were identified as disobedient and, I mean, they tried to end you. I watched it. Yeah. So you shrug it off or whatever, but you shrug it off. But from my perspective, it's always you see things clearly when you look at someone else's life.

Sure. Absolutely. I didn't even know you at the time. I was like, why are they trying to why are they trying to kill this guy?

Yeah. Right. Well, they were. And that's my interpretation of it anyway, but you can't brood on it. No.

But, but the the fact that the mechanics they they were trying to install the mechanisms by which Oh, yeah. The all this stuff would have been locked down. And and we saw in the, during the COVID period, how, how effective it was.

Yes.

I mean, look, we've the the new head of the NIH, you know, Jay Bhattacharya, we mostly didn't hear about his research. Right? I mean, this this is the guy who

can you believe Jay Bhattacharya, who I love? Not thoroughly decent man, by the way, in addition to being right on the science, but he's a decent guy.

He's like the sweetest guy in the world. Yes. Yeah. I know. Absolutely.

He's the head of NIH?

Yeah. I know. Isn't that amazing? Kidding. Yeah.

He went he goes from being censored to being the head of NIH. It's it's an it's an amazing transition, but the but the thing that that's so extraordinary about it is America would have had a completely different idea about lockdowns if they had understood how infectious the disease was, how fruitless it was to try to physically prevent people from, you know, getting infected, and, and, and how unlikely that was to succeed and how, you know, compared to all the other, negatives that could have happened from keeping people at home and everything like that. Like, they wouldn't have made that decision going forward. But they were able to effectively suppress that point of view, which is really scary. Right?

I mean, there was real research out there, and most people didn't see it. I didn't see it until a year and a half later.

No. I know. Right? No.

So, and that's that's what could happen. That that's what could have happened with all this stuff. So I

I know that you without getting too specific, but you're, you know, you're in touch with doctors, like, on a personal level. Like, you know doctors. Just practicing, you know, clinical physicians. Right?

Mom, my wife's the doctor.

Okay. I didn't know if you wanted to say that. You're married to a doctor. Mhmm. So did they know like, they it was kept from them too.

Like, they didn't Yeah. I mean average, like, emergency room physician was, like, aware that a lot of the COVID propaganda was fake.

Well, yeah. I mean, I know some ER doctors as well. And they had to go looking for for information. That's what

you're saying.

And it was very hard to find. And, you know, to this day, if you you go on Google and you go looking for things, you're not likely to find the sort of counter narrative thing easily. And I think for a lot of doctors during that period, it was frustrating because, even peer reviewed research was not always easy to find, for them. So, yeah. During that period, it affected the whole question of like, experts who talked to the press.

Like, they weren't always informed about what was going on or about different studies that had been done. And, yeah, we had a completely different idea about the pandemic than maybe we should have. But the point being is not so much that that was destructive in itself, though I think it was, but that it was a proof of concept of something that that was to come. You know?

Do you think that as we unearth more about COVID that the biggest question of all, which was what was the point of that? Clearly, it was a point. I mean, if every part of the society was coordinated and aimed toward the same goal, which is increasing the fear, preserving the lies about its origin, hiding a lot of stuff, and, like, telling you and and pushing you toward the vaccine. So, like and it was utterly coordinated. If anyone's coordinated, that was from the churches to the schools, to the media, everything.

Everyone's on the same page. Like, why?

I don't know. I mean, that that's that's what we have to that's why these documents will be so fascinating to get.

That we'll ever get to them we'll ever be able to say with some certainty or confidence, like, this is why they did that.

We we may not know some of the higher level thinking about things. I mean, you're probably not gonna get a document that says, look, it's really important that we do this because, if we really stress masking, then we'll have established the precedent of that visible symbols of conformity are, are, you know, a positive goal for an authoritarian regime. I mean, they're not going to have that on paper anywhere. Right? Yes.

But there, you know, there might be emails back and forth about how we get people to, to follow instructions about how how we manage, the problem of academic freedom. Right? There there are probably going to be emails back and forth saying we have to change America's thinking about this and get them to start thinking more in the direction of trusting authority. Right. There's probably going to be some stuff about that because we've already seen that in, you know, FOIA disclosures with some, you know, some of these anti disinformation groups and that, that sort of thing.

So I imagine there's, there's gonna be some stuff with the White House, the CDC, the NIH, there, there, there, there might be some things like that in there, But the higher level, sort of broader conspiratorial questions, I don't I don't know what we're gonna get. But I'm fascinated to find out.

Me too. I wanna tell you about an amazing documentary series from our friend Sean Stone called All the President's Men, the conspiracy against Trump. It is a series of interviews with people at the very heart of the first Trump term, many of whom are close to the heart of the second Trump term. This is their stories about what permanent Washington tried to do to them, in many cases, send them to prison for the crime of supporting Donald Trump. Their words have never been more relevant than they are now.

Steve Bannon, Kash Patel, I'm in there even. All the president's men, the conspiracy against Trump, and you will find it only on tcntuckercarlson.com. Highly recommended. So okay. So, ugh, COVID.

Next. Okay. Russiagate? Russiagate. And, you know, the the sort of related phenomenon of fake news, intelligence leaks designed to destroy careers, which bleeds into kind of lawfare.

Right? But Russiagate specifically, that's a big story. That's a place where I think that's going to be the easiest hit for investigators because the doc, we know where the documents are. In some cases, we even have them already. We just they're redacted.

So we get to look under the redactions now. Why did they start the original investigation? What was the, what was the impetus for the July 31 opening, in, in 2016 of Crossfire Hurricane? You know, there's some conflicting stories in the past. Did it really come from Britain?

Did John Brennan really advise the CIA to look into it or was it something else? Why did the FBI open an investigation into Trump specifically after he had taken office in It's just an extraordinary thing. Thinking, you know, back to that time, we don't remember it, but the FBI opened a probe into the sitting president of The United States, to ask the question of whether he was working for a foreign power at that time. And what evidence could they have possibly had for that, apart from the fact that he fired Jim Comey? If there's

Did they even I mean, they had no evidence.

They if there's nothing under those redactions more than that, then that itself was an it's an extraordinary scandal just by itself. Right?

So the predicate for all of this, I think, and maybe even earlier, but to my knowledge, late in the with the hacking of the DNC and the e the emails from the DNC. And if they never investigated it, never investigated the actual you know, the physical removal of this data from their servers instead of a company called CrowdStrike, which worked for the Democratic Party did. And then exactly at that moment, or right around that moment, a DNC staffer was killed in Washington DC in an apparent robbery in which nothing was taken from him that I happen to know for a fact the MPD, the Metropolitan Police Department thought was, like, bizarre and did they kinda didn't believe it. A Fox News host went on air and asked questions about this killing. Why wouldn't you?

And the parents of the man who was killed either sued or I think they sued. They certainly threatened to sue and basically scared the crap out of everyone. So no one's ever asked a question about it since.

They hired a private investigator, who looked around, in that case, I remember. And there were there were some odd details there. The FBI ended up in possession of, of his laptop and then ended up

FBI wind up in I mean, this is a local crime, right?

Yeah. That that this was 1 of the first reasons I started to look at that case because I got a call from somebody about that. And, you know, I don't know why that was the case, but it is the case.

But And there were people at the DNC, 1 of whom I know, who thought that he was murdered for political reasons at the DNC. A very high ranking person at the DNC told me that and I probably should just say but I everyone can guess who it is who's informed on this but I don't wanna betray confidence but I'm I'm not making this up. Mhmm. And I don't know what happened, but, like, as far as I know, not 1 person has looked into that in the media.

No. And, you know, eve even if it is just an unsolved murder, of a type that they normally solve, the whole situation that that whole timeline was very strange. It doesn't really make sense. The, you know, the hacking of, of the DNC, the bringing in of CrowdStrike, the when the information was released, online, they never really proved that case, but they immediately made inferences about it. And there was an incredibly sophisticated kind of public campaign to create this narrative that, you know, upon closer examination turns out not to be true.

So we gotta go back and find out what did exactly happen there. Why did they, why did they order this crossfire hurricane probe? Why were they sending informants in after Trump, or people in his orbit? And we know they did.

Who were all those informants? It'd be interesting. I have some suspicions.

Yeah. Well, we know we know who some of them were. Right? But we don't know who all of them all of them were. I mean, I I did a story to the effect that the the people in the House Intelligence Committee who were looking at this, you know, Kash Patel's initial, probe that they came up with a number that it was 26 different, people who were, being investigated in Trump's orbit.

No matter what happened, it's a huge story because it's a political espionage story. It's not unlike Watergate, really. And they, and we've laughed it off, or the, you know, the mainstream press has shrugged and snorted at the idea that this is a scandal that needs to be, taken seriously. But it does. It absolutely does.

Just because it's Donald Trump doesn't mean you can ignore the FBI conducting political investigations, willy nilly and inventing predicates to look into people's campaigns and using FISA and all kinds of other crazy. Can I say crazy shit? I mean, that stuff was all nuts and we we need to find out exactly what happened with that. And that is 1 of the reasons I think that people are nervous about this weaponization of government probe, because it's absolutely going to look in that direction. And, you know, that's 1 of the first things they're going to look at is who was behind that?

You know, who cooked up the Steele dossier? How was that released? You know, and then there's the whole question of, you know, leading up to impeachment and the ill the leaks that were done. A lot of them were kind of illegal on their face. Right?

Like, you can't leak signals intelligence to, newspapers, and it was done repeatedly during that

time. After me, they did it to me. Right.

Yeah. Exactly.

The NSA read my text and leaked them to the New York Times twice. Right. Right. Yeah. And they, you know, admitted it 1 time, but it was under FISA.

So it was like Yeah. Which which is, by the way, hilarious because the the initially, they were denying that it even happened. Right? And then of course, later it turns out, it was more advantageous to leak the contents. So, but people had developed, they developed very short memories during this time period.

They were not able to retain information among other things because journalists got out of the habit of repeating the story. That is, that was 1 of the things that we were taught. You know, when I I was taught growing up, when you're doing a story by anything, you have to recount all of the facts as if the the reader has never encountered the story before. Each story should stand alone. Yes.

Exactly. You have to you have to retell the whole thing so that they don't have to go looking for another story

That's exactly right.

To to find out what this means. Exactly. And 1 of the subtle little changes that happened to the media business in the last 8 years is they stopped doing that. They would tell you That's fascinating. Right?

They would tell you the thing that happened that day and they wouldn't tell you all this backstory that you needed to know to to really understand, what you were reading. And so, yeah, I think we're going to have the opportunity now to see these things laid out in full and, you know, in hindsight, and that's hopefully going to be able to persuade people who who didn't see it the first time.

That's such a fascinating observation which I've never heard before or thought of.

But isn't it isn't it true?

It's so true. It's so true. And so everything's out of context. Right. Yeah.

There's there's a a certain element of dot connecting required in journalism. Like, why am I telling you this? Why does it matter? How does it connect to things that happen other things that happened or may happen?

Like Even simple things like when, you know, the if Anthony Fauci comes out and says, well, masks are important because of X. Well, you have to put in the timeline of what he originally said about that. Yes. Or, you know, Joe Joe Biden saying, you know, we have to correct misinformation because they're killing people. And you gotta point out that they were wrong about things themselves, that the, that the or that the Biden administration itself was, de amplified, by some of these, platforms accidentally, but they were.

Right? But yeah, they just left out a lot of backstory and we have to get back into the the the business of telling people the whole story from the beginning.

Fascinating. Yeah. Okay.

So Russiagate. Russiagate. We I mean and that's 1 of the reasons why the the pardon of Adam Schiff is kind of interesting, because he's a central figure of, of both the j 6 committee, but but also the Russiagate story. And you know, he was somebody who was giving interviews saying that preemptive pardons should never be given, but whatever. Yes, Russiagate is a thing.

Then there's the whole question of lawfare, right? And the effort to make sure that Biden faced no opposition at all, in his reelection campaign. And this is here. I'm not just talking about, you know, Donald Trump and the lawsuit to prevent him from being on the ballot because of the fourteenth amendments and all that. This extends to even to groups like no labels or the green party or Dean Phillips or Marianne Williamson or Cornel West.

There was an extraordinary calculated effort to prevent competition. Now Yes. That's not necessarily illegal. Parties can do whatever they want, internally, but it's still fascinating that there, there had to have been some kind of coordinated campaign. If, if there's any communication between the White House say and the groups that we're suing, you know, no labels or RFK or, you know, issuing challenges.

No labels went through this extraordinary incident where somebody created a dummy no labels site, and it had a big picture of Donald Trump on it. So that would try to, associate no labels with Trump. And there's a lawsuit, going on about it right now. What What was the real origin of that? Like, you know, who who who financed that whole thing?

I mean, I think there are a lot of stories about little tiny dirty tricks that are that are going to be coming.

Well, it also, like, the the main question was who makes these decisions? So if the Democratic Party is running The United States, which they have for 4 years, I think we can say that. What does that mean? Who's running the Democratic Party?

Right. I mean,

I would imagine it's a coalition of, you know, elected official, you know, Chuck Schumer, big fundraisers. Right?

Mhmm.

You know, Jeffrey Katzenberg and, I don't know, Obama, I guess. But but who who really is running this? Who's on the central committee?

Right. And and how is that done? How how how was the coordination managed with these sort of legal action committees that were mass filing suits about everything from, you know, the, the ballot access issue to the, there were Klan act suits that were filed against people. I mean, did that have any connection to people who are actually in office? If it, if it did, you know, then we have another corruption situation involved.

But, yeah, the the the larger question of who who was managing all this stuff, because it clearly wasn't Joe Biden. That's Right. Who runs the country? Who who who runs the country? That's Don't

in a democracy we have right to know.

Right. That, you know, our our mutual friend, Walter Kern, talked about this saying that this was the first time that we had a president where that had a sign on his desk, basically, it said, the buck does not stop here. Right? We, we don't know where the buck stopped during this period. And so that that's a fascinating question, but the whole, you know, war gaming of, of the last election season.

There are a lot of stories. People don't even remember this. Like, New Hampshire held a primary, right? People went and they voted in the New Hampshire primary. And then the results were canceled and they held a second nominating event on a Saturday night, months later, where a bunch of officials got together and they just decided to allocate the delegates, themselves.

Like, I'd never heard of that before, just canceling an election and just sort of redoing it in a in a closed meeting. Like, how does that happen?

And just turning the spoils over to somebody else? Well, I

I mean, I think it ended up mostly having the same result, but for some reason, they they they held the second contest. It's just very strange, you know, why that happened. So that we gotta get into, you know, then there's the whole question of the investigation of the Trump assassination incidents. We heard nothing about that. It was the most extraordinary news story that I've ever, I mean, apart from the disappearing president and the mysterious nomination and COVID, you know, presidential candidate and ex president gets shot and the story's dead within like 48.

And all you read in the news from the FBI, there were these comments saying that they don't have any motive evidence. We've done a hundred interviews, but we don't know anything about why this happened or, you know, what was going on there. Do you believe that? I I I have a very hard time believing that there's nothing interesting in there.

Kind of your classic 20 year old American kid with no social media presence whatsoever ever.

You know? Right.

Just a second. It is a very typical American story where 1 day you just wake up and decide to die assassinating a presidential candidate for no reason.

Right. It's like who has It's like your first joint. Yeah. Your first joint. Yeah.

And then this, this, the second 1, I mean, you know, the, the Ryan Ralph thing that, that's not weird at all. Like, I just flew into Florida last night. I don't think I could have gotten, gotten my hands on, you know, a Chinese made SKS semiautomatic rifle without help. I mean, I I don't know. That's being a little conspiratorial, but look, there are a

lot of met with the members of congress. He was lived in Ukraine. What? And we know that our intelligence is working through the Ukrainian intelligence. He's have murdered all these people and tried to murder all these people, including some I know personally.

And so that's a, like, that's just a fact, and he he was there with them. But this had nothing to do and by the way, are those the only 2 attempts on Donald Trump's life, do you think, during this campaign season? I don't think so.

So I don't know more about that. I don't know why we don't know more about that.

Right. So and I I mean, I've, you know, talked to the Trump people and Trump himself, and I I I'm being sincere. I really don't have a sense of what they think of all of that. I know that in public, they haven't been anxious to talk about it at all.

So I've talked to some of them and, you know, I've heard, a lot of anger about this that, you know, and I think this is, this is the impetus for these investigations. I think the probably the second attempt, was the last straw for some of the people on his staff. And, and you know, it's part of the reason why I think they're gonna be very public about this.

It can't come it can't come too soon. I I really think and and I will say, you know, whatever people watching think of Trump, I know for a dead certain fact that a lot of people who work for him really like him personally. So I think they are mad about it.

They're they're very mad about it. And and and then sorry. Just to finish off the the the censorship thing, that is gonna be a major investigation. There's there's at least 2 that I know of, that are already underway. You know, the government affair, the, you know, Rand Paul's committee, government oversight committee in, in the senate.

They were they really wanna do a big thing like a government files type of thing, where it would be like the Twitter files, but for the whole federal government, basically. And I I think there are so many different wings of the government that were involved, in what we got to see in the Twitter files, which, you know, to follow the, the example of what I just said, I have to repeat what this is. You know, when Elon Musk bought Twitter, he opened up Twitter, Twitter's internal correspondence. And we got to see that there was this big, bureaucracy with government pressuring platforms like Twitter and Facebook to censor content. But we only got to see a little bit of it.

And I think what's gonna come out is, you know, how extensive it really was, what agencies were really involved in it. You know, how many people, were were committed to that effort. What also were we negotiating with, the European Union to be part of the Digital Services Act? Was the State Department doing that? I think so there's gonna be a

big followed it. Can you just describe the digital services act?

The digital services act is like the it's like the wet dream of every sensor in in the world. Right? Basically, it mandates that every, internet platform abide by the recommendations of these people called trusted flaggers, who are basically licensed content reviewers who look on things on social media. And if they see a narrative that they don't like, they will elevate it to the platform. And if the platform does not abide by the recommendations, they get crippling enormous fines.

And this is 1 of the reasons why there was a dispute between, Elon Musk and Europe, about whether or not he was following these rules closely, closely enough. This just came into effect last year. But it's, it's an extremely effective way to, regulate speech because it doesn't require the government to actually do it. It's the private platform that actually commits, of course, the censorship and this third party methodology, which is specifically by the way, what, what Donald Trump referenced in his free speech executive order. We don't want that to happen.

We're gonna not allow that. They already have the full blown death star version in Europe of that. Right. And so the investigation here in The United States is going to basically uncover how far along were we into developing the same kind of thing. The Twitter file suggested that we were already doing it informally, and illegally probably, but we wanna find out exactly.

With with Snopes and all the other fact checkers.

Yes. All the fact checking organizations. Right? You know, sometimes that was done informally, by inference or it was done through NGOs that made recommendations. But I think the really dangerous stuff is when you had state department agencies like, you know, the global engagement center or the FBI's foreign influence task force making direct recommendations to these platforms or the White House in your case.

You know, we're gonna find out all of these communications, not just little pieces of them. What about,

the US government, the intel agencies control of Wikipedia, which basically is our collective memory at this point. It's elevated by Google. It's top of every search. It is the only history most people will ever read, and it's controlled by the US government to disappear inconvenient facts.

Yeah. I mean, Wikipedia has a very, advanced system for regulating what gets into Wikipedia pages. If you, if it's not a certain kind of source, it doesn't get on there. There was a bizarre incident last year where the real clear politics, you know, polling average, which is a tool that reporters have been using for almost 2 decades. They kind of left it off their page, of polling average sites, because they didn't like the page, I guess.

I don't know. But yeah, I think we have to get some clarity about what happened there. Obviously, the former head of Wikipedia, is now in a or a senior position in NPR. The deputy or the COO

1 government media job to another.

Yeah. Exactly. And the the COO of NPR is the former head of this thing called the Aspen Commission on Information Disorder, which is 1 of the groups that we investigated in the Twitter files. It was sort of heavily into this whole content moderation question. So the merging of state media with platforms and regulation of sourcing and all that stuff, that's probably gonna come out too.

Kind of weird that the head of the Aspens too wrote the biography of Elon Musk, isn't it?

Right. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. The well, Walter Pincus.

Right?

Isaacson.

Isaac. Sorry.

Walter Pincus was the CIA reporter at the Washington Post. Can you

cut that? I'm sorry.

No. No. No. No. It's just funny.

Yeah. Do you remember Walter Pincus?

Yeah. Walter Isaacson. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

No. The the it is weird. The Aspen Institute, I mean, they played a very strange role in the whole censorship story. But, but yeah.

So what happens to the you you said the media as constituted is dead, But, I mean, like the Episcopal church, like, they have enormous, like, shells left. You know what I mean? Like, the churches died, but the they've got great churches, great buildings. What do you what happens to, like, the Washington Post and NBC News? There's still bureaus and CNN and, like, what what happens to these things?

They're gonna struggle, I think, to get audience back. You already see that the strategy of some of them is to try to pander to the audiences that they'd betrayed previously. Yeah. There was a funny episode over last weekend where NBC and Saturday Night Live, you know, they finally did a joke picking on Rachel Maddow. It wasn't particularly funny, but it was a signal that, okay, we're we're going to suck up to this group now.

Right? As opposed to the other 1, which is so loathsome. Right? And that but

Rachel Maddow is not the core whatever you think of Rachel Maddow, she just, like, advertises herself as Rachel Maddow. You know, 1 person's opinions.

That's funny. You sounded like her for a secondary.

Yeah. Well, I know her, and I know I've never been mad at her. I couldn't disagree more. And I know I'm sure she's attacked me a lot. I wouldn't know, but I'm not mad at Rachel Maddow.

I'm I'm mad at and, like No. Of course. You know what I mean? People who pose as reporters who are actually just mouthpieces for the intel world.

Of course. And and, my only point is that just by, you know, changing their the direction of their BS Right. They're not gonna win back audience. Right? People, you know, and this is something that I that I've noticed since I've been in the business.

People in media continually underestimate audiences. They think that they're much stupider than they really are. I remember when I covered, Wall Street, I was constantly told that you, you can't do these big stories on credit default swaps and all these other things because audiences don't want to hear about it. They'll, they'll turn the page, but it's not true. People have a great hunger to find out things and they have a much stronger ability to understand things than most media people imagine.

And so when they do these sort of transparent, exercises in lying and PR and political propaganda and they think that people won't notice, it makes it worse. The the the numbers are gonna go down rather than up when they start.

Totally true. Don't you think?

I mean

Well, it's just interesting. I actually think it's more sinister even than you described. So the 2 topics after, you know, 30 years in the in television, the 2 topics that they, like, never wanted to do, they always wanna do stuff about trannies or race or, you know, whatever, all that stuff, but they never wanna do economics or foreign policy ever. Right. And their view was or their their stated view was the audience doesn't care.

And then I get fired and start doing foreign policy stuff, and it gets crazy numbers. And I only do it purely because I'm interested. That's it. I was always interested, and I'm also interested in economics. Not an expert, but I think it matters.

That's that's why I'm interested. Right? You do a story like that, you you blow out of the water all the PAP that they do. So it turns out there's a deep reservoir of interest among viewers and readers for these stories. And I'm starting to think that maybe the people who run the networks where I worked, they just didn't want to address that stuff because there was a consensus on it that they agreed with and that they didn't wanna challenge.

Absolutely. You think so? Oh, I a %, I think that. I think that, especially when you're talking about, you know, interventionist military policies, whether or not they've been effective. Try try pitching stories to, you know, 1 of the big newspapers about, you know, maybe some kind of downside to, an invasion or an occupation or the expansion of, you know, with a thousand military bases in The Middle East or whatever it is, drone warfare, like, you know, you're gonna have a hard time selling that 1.

Right?

But they did it in the slightest way. I mean, it went right over my head for decades. They did it not by saying, you know, we just don't agree. You know, we we have 1 perspective on that, and we're gonna stick with it. That's a straightforward way to to explain it, which I can digest.

They instead said, no. The audience just doesn't care, and you're basically putting the business at risk by covering things that people don't understand, so get back to Natalie Holloway or whatever the

Exactly.

Drama of the moment was. Yep. And I believed that. I believed it. I mean, I just assumed people just aren't interested.

I guess I internalized the our audience's dumb position, which they had for the whole time I worked there.

Yeah. And it's it's worse in TV than it is in print, but, but it shouldn't be. Right? And, but I and I got the same thing. I mean, not not so much at Rolling Stone, but I remember we did 1 story where our plan was to do 1 story on what caused the financial crisis.

And we got such an overwhelming response because it wasn't anywhere. People could not read anywhere, what happened to the economy in 02/8. There there was not a rational explanation that people could read. And so

Well, you did big, I guess, numbers is not applicable to a magazine, but that got I mean, your stories on that were widely read because because you're 1 of the only people doing it.

Right. But it wasn't so much what what I was doing. It was just it was just the fact of, you know, how does this work? Who was really profiting by it? What happened to the people who bought these homes?

Etcetera, etcetera. Just basic questions and people wanted to know. And and as you discover, they wanna know other things. So where are they spending the money that I send every year that goes to the Pentagon?

That's right.

Right? How is how is it disappear into a black hole and it's not auditable and that's okay? And

I you know, it's funny. I remember getting back in the summer, February, from Maine. I've been in Maine. And, you know, on just on vacation going back to work. And our I was at CNN then, and we were wall to wall literally wall to wall on a story about a congressman from Bakersfield, California, Kern County called Oh, yeah.

Gary Condit. Mhmm. And the question was, did he murder his intern, Chandra Levy? And then later, whatever, in case anyone cares, turns out she was killed by an illegal alien from El Salvador called Ingmar Guendecke. He killed a couple other people, I think.

Anyway, whatever. That was the story. But at the time, we were fully immersed in this question of, is this moderate Democrat from Bakersfield a murderer? And, I mean, we did specials on it. It's all we did.

And then that Sept. 0, that was interrupted by 09:11. And I remember thinking, at the time, like, 09:11 came out of nowhere. There was no kind of backstory. It just happened.

It was, like, truly, like, the least expected thing that ever happened. Right. Right. In retrospect, I think, were there things going on in the world, long bigger trends that maybe we should, you know, as a news company, we should have been paying attention to? Sure.

Prepare people for the at least the idea that, like, wow, something bad could happen because there's a lot going on abroad.

Yeah. I mean, I think if you had visited parts of the Middle East back then, you would Oh,

we had the coal bombing and then, like, the Saudis where we had bases in places that were clearly very provocative for no real reason.

Oh, Fatwa, the the Kenyan bombing.

Yes. Right? Yeah. Exactly. There was a lot going on, and we just kind of ignored all of it.

But we didn't just ignore it. We ignored it in, like, this manic way, like, must cover Gary Condit. And I'm not a conspiracy nut, Matt. But you do sort of wonder, like, what was that?

Yeah. Those were the good old days when when the the manias were things like the summer of the shark. Right? Remember that?

Do I remember? I think I I think I participated in

it. Should

you swim? But but then you get 09:11, like, this 1, you know, sort of beautiful fall morning and everything changes. And it's like I I do think it's fair to ask even if there's no intent involved. Like, how did we like, what should we have done differently to at least give people the sense that there were highly organized, well funded elements abroad that hated us? Like, I just did not know that, and most people didn't.

Yeah. And it and it came

we do that? Honestly.

And it came as a shock to a lot of people.

Like, a complete shock.

Yeah. I

don't know. Were you in the country when that happened? No.

I was I was in Russia,

and Well, so at least you have that excuse. You know, you're not living in another country. I lived in Washington DC covering the news for c I mean, I hosted a show on CNN, and I had no idea that, like,

that's a terrifying feeling, right, to to be you gotta cover something that you have no back background in.

Well, there was no covering it. There was just watching it.

Right. Yeah.

Right? And there's never actually been any covering of it. No one's ever really covered 9 11. Like, what was that? Yeah.

Exactly.

And and what followed it? Yeah. Exactly.

Yeah. Well, I'm we did cover that. But, like, the 09:11, like, how do how exactly did that happen? We have all these law enforcement and intelligence agencies protecting us, and they had no idea that there are, you know, dozens and dozens and dozens of, you know, the 19 hijackers, but then all the support people living in our country, training, getting money from we never really what? Anyway, I don't know why I'm going off on that, but it's like, no 1 ever asked the basic questions.

Right. Right. And, you know, there there are a lot of people who didn't ask basic questions in the last 8 years. Yeah. I've noticed.

Including me, I guess. Because a lot of the things you just said were like, yeah. Whatever happened to that?

Well, there's it it becomes overwhelming after a while. That's right. Right? I mean, you know, the fiftieth time they tell you that democracy is gonna end in 10 minutes or, you know, you're gonna die if you don't, you know, take this medicine or whatever or whatever it is or, you know, your kids are gonna die. It emotionally, it wears on people and it becomes very difficult.

I mean, I think this was a factor in it was a factor in a lot of the corruption stories because the audiences were not were they were not going to be receptive to alternative versions of what they had just heard because it was such an emotionally wrenching experience for them. So, it it's gonna take a while for people to digest a lot of these things. You know, I think it's happening slowly, but, but what's gonna be interesting about this period is that if there's gonna be this avalanche of primary material that's that's gonna that's going to come out. And I'm fast. I I can't wait for your staff.

To hire more staff to keep up with it all.

Yeah. Absolutely. Probably probably that's the case. And it's gonna be a fun time for for journalists like me, but just just as a citizen, I can't wait to read it, you know?

So can I ask 1 last question of your your reporting is marked by its command of detail, I would say? I mean, it is. I read it. Whole

full. Yeah.

Yeah. No. But I've, like, a lot of detail. Like, a lot of detail. And so you look at things.

I I kind of, like, you know, I'm not a detail guy. You are. What name 1, like, tiny detail that you are personally obsessed with and maybe mildly embarrassed to admit you're obsessed with, but, like, what's the 1 thing that you just you wanna know? Like, you that you've been wondering about.

I I mean, I I think the thing that happened last year with that frenzied week in July 0 Yeah. With, with Biden and, you know, and the, and the, the lying about the poll numbers and the, the phony, the clearly planted stories about Nancy Pelosi. Remind you about the

poll numbers? What about Oh,

there were look, there were stories that Biden was ahead in the polls that that came out as they were telling us that he had to drop out because the poll numbers were so dire. NPR did a story, like, virtually, I believe it was this, a couple of days after, the debate. I'll have to go back and look at this. But there but, yeah, there were stories that that that he was doing fine in the polls. And and, of course, we later found out from Biden staffers that they said they never had, I'm sorry.

That that was about Kamala. They never had internal polling showing Kamala ahead.

Yes.

Even though there were scads of stories telling us the opposite, which is but for me, the the the the story that I I just can't get past is what happened in that 1 week. And and how did they how did they manufacture that whole thing without anybody showing any kind of curiosity about it? You know, had the media been so completely paper trained by that moment that they I I I guess so. Right? But Well, it's

the same but it's the same impulse that maintains discipline in Washington and in the media, which is commitment to party first. And what is so that is the 1 thing like, all the things I disagree with the Democratic Party and some of the Republican Party on policy, like, I have all kinds of disagreements. I think that. They think this okay. Got it.

But the 1 thing I really can't relate to is the loyalty to party. What is that?

I I never understood that. You know, like, what? You're gonna agree with a a bunch of people on everything that they do, and you're gonna support that. It's 1 thing for politicians to act that way, but I I cannot understand it in a media person. Do you

think that's a defining fact of, like, our life is this commitment to to party?

Well, right now we have the situation where the only versions of things that you get are essentially party Yes. Explanations. And that's why, it's so in for it's so interesting that there's this sort of intermediate podcast space where people are exploring things from all different directions and that's where all the people are going. I don't think it's a coincidence.

Can that last?

I think it can. I think what's gonna happen is you're go you're going to have new institutions that are built up around that that are, that are just going to find new ways to

And you can't have, as long as that lasts, you can't have authoritarian rule.

Right. Oh, yeah. And, and that was proven. I mean, look, the handful of podcasts that a lot of people chuckled about had a huge impact in the, in the last election. And you know what?

Shame on those media people who laugh at those podcasts, because among other things, they had lower numbers than a lot of those podcasts, like significantly lower. Most

of them.

Yeah. Right? And, you know, they're snobs about it. They say, oh, well, that's you know, we we have a better quality of audience. No.

You you you just are not convincing. That's They

actually have a much lower quality of audience. You know, your average Rogan listener is way smarter than your average cable news viewer. Like, sorry. Right.

Yeah. And and they're more willing and partly because they watch shows like Joe Rogan, which which ask them to entertain multiple points of view on things. Right? That's kind of the whole idea. You you you you'll see somebody.

There are lots of people who go on the Rogan show that I disagree with, but I hear it,

you know?

And that's the whole point, right? Is you get to hear different points of view and that's been excluded from this other form of media, this kind of bifurcated red, blue landscape, which doesn't work anymore and is in collapse. But, I just think that this this period now, it's going to be great for launching the this new media that's necessary because they're gonna have all this material to work with. And because it's gonna be all documents, people are gonna trust it. Right?

In in the same way that they trusted the Twitter files, I didn't have anything to say about it. I just sort of put it out there. But, all these new these independent organs are going to look at this these reams of material, and they're gonna discuss it and pass it around. And that's gonna be how the public is educated, which is great. I love it.

The best. Right?

Man, you put me in such a better mood. Matt, tell you, thank you. No. Thank you. Seriously.

I mean, I I I think you would do this for free. I get that feeling.

Absolutely would.

I love it.

Thanks, Tucker.

Thank you. Appreciate it. Thanks for listening to Tucker Carlson Show. If you enjoyed it, you can go to TuckerCarlson.com to see everything that we have made, the complete library. TuckerCarlson.com.