I had the great pleasure of interviewing Matt Taibbi this week. We talked about Kamala Harris’ fitness to be a Presidential Candidate, how Matt thinks it is ‘strange’ no questions are being asked about how Harris became the nominee, the failures of the Trump assassination attempt, why Matt thinks ‘profound’ changes are taking place in how Americans think about the world, and the future of government overreach in the U.S.
Taibbi is the head of Racket News and his reputation as a fearless investigative journalist precedes him. From his groundbreaking coverage of the 2008 financial crisis to his more recent explorations of censorship with the Twitter Files, politics, systemic inequality and the inner workings of Congress, Taibbi's body of work reflects a deep commitment to uncovering truths and challenging conventional narratives.
On the recommendation of one of my readers, I first asked Matt how he finds the courage to do what he does. He told me: “I guess the sincere answer to that is I started my journalism career overseas in post-communist Russia. Some of my first mentors in journalism were actually Russian investigative journalists. They had just been given freedom of the press, free speech, sort of. But it was a very hazardous environment where if you wrote the wrong thing, people were getting blown up by exploding suitcases shot in their doorways, people jumping through windows with crowbars, that kind of thing.”
He continued: “So I watched those people work for like eight years. So anytime anybody talks about people like me being brave, I always kind of feel like rolling my eyes a little bit because, you know, in other parts of the world, journalists go through much tougher things and take much bigger risks. So the least we can do is what the job is. And I think, you know, journalists mostly, we're not rocket scientists or doctors. The main job requirement is being, you know, willing to say obnoxious things to powerful people. I think, you know, that's kind of the job baseline."
From there, I asked Matt what unsuspecting countries people should know are now similarly censoring speech. His answer surprised me: "Well, in this new age of digital censorship, there's a whole bunch of countries that you have to worry about now. I mean, I have a friend who got arrested in Germany. He's a playwright who published a book. He was critical of the COVID policy, and he was trying to imply that the modern sort of health authorities were compared to, you know, he wanted to compare them satirically kind of to Nazis. So he, he, on the cover of his book is a mat, a white mask with a faintly visible white swastika. And you know, he gets, he's up on charges now, you know, and there are a lot of these new digital censorship laws carry actual sentences that you can actually go to jail for, for, you know, putting the wrong social media post up, saying the wrong thing, but putting the wrong image in an advertisement or online.”
“This is happening in different places around Europe. Scotland just passed a very tough law. Canada is considering passing one of the more bizarre laws of I've actually seen in speech,” Matt told me. “It actually likely will pass and you can be convicted if they pass that they'll be able to convict you for things you haven't even done yet. So there's all kinds of stuff that they're doing in the West, which are really scary. And that's one of the things that I think Americans don't pay attention to because we only watch our own stuff and we don't pay attention to what's going on in our, you know, even our close allies."
I then asked Matt about the bizarre swap of Joe Biden as the Democrats’ presidential candidate.
