Matt Taibbi
speaker
209 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Matt Taibbi’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Really? Yes.
Yeah. Or to keep the public's attention elsewhere. That's what I mean. What possible reason would there be to do this? You're not really going to make any military gains by doing this. So, 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. So, what were they doing? And, you know, if that's what you're saying, there were...
fiddling with regime change in the interim. Yeah, I think that was a fear that a lot of people had. I didn't think that, frankly, that Trump would become president. I thought, you know, for a variety of different reasons, I don't know exactly what could have happened to stop that, but... It was hard for me to accept that it did happen.
It does, but I think the moment has passed for the real, like there was a moment where They could have installed, you know, a European-style regime to stop misinformation. This is the new trend, right? Remember the hurricanes happened and immediately FEMA's talking about setting up an anti-misinformation center, right? It just happened in California.
Right. I mean, the fact that Gavin Newsom had time to try to come up with a state bureau for protecting my reputation. But they could really have done that. They could have basically put a net over everything.
I mean, that's the thing that's scary about the European situation is they already have that massive infrastructure in place to completely control the flow of information, what people see, what people don't see. They can punish people who step out of line. And we were this far away from being part of
something like that and if they were going to 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 one would see it. It would be like, you know... No, it's totally right. Right.
I mean, you know this because 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. What did you think when you saw that, by the way?
No, but the fact that the mechanics, they were trying to install the mechanisms by which all this stuff would have been locked down. And we saw during the COVID period how effective it was. I mean, look, the new head of the NIH, Jay Bhattacharya- We mostly didn't hear about his research, right?
He's like the sweetest guy in the world. Yeah, no, absolutely.
Yeah, I know. Isn't that amazing? I'm kidding! Yeah. He goes from being censored to being the head of NIH. It's an amazing transition, but the thing 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 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 uh and that's that's what could happen that's what could have happened with all this stuff so but 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
Well, I mean, I know some ER doctors as well, and they had to go looking for information. And it was very hard to find. And, you know, to this day, if you go on Google and you go looking for things, you're not likely to find anything.
the the sort of counter-narrative thing easily uh and i think for a lot of doctors during that period it was frustrating because um even peer-reviewed research was not always easy to find uh for them so yeah uh 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 or about different studies that have been done and yeah we had a completely different idea about the 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 was to come, you know?
I don't know. I mean, that's, that's what we have to, that's why these documents will be so fascinating to get. Do you think that we'll ever get to that?
We may not know some of the higher level thinking about things. I mean, you're probably not going to 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 a positive goal for an authoritarian regime.
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