Episode 33: "America This Week," with Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn

So, um, I'm glad, I'm glad to hear it. Well, how about you? where are you? uh, back in Las Vegas, land of the land of the low odds proposition.

Um, but uh, yeah, yeah, I had a friend here. It's nice when I have visitors who've never been to Las Vegas, they're usually just enchanted and delighted. They're like, Where was this place?

I'd heard about it, but um, it's sort of what I used to imagine New York would be when I was a little boy, before I'd been to New York. And that's one of the reasons I like it, you know, I, I like it. 24 hours. Um, and uh, it's starting to pick up for the summer. The they're having the auditions for the people who serve drinks at the pools, the beautiful body, people. Um, you know, Las Vegas comes into its own from about now until July or so.

Excellent when it just becomes so ungodly great. Um, I'm going to, I'm going.

My my father was born in Hawaii, he was adopted. Um, and so we have. We have relatives in Hawaii, uh, my Filipino relatives whom I've never met. So, um, we're. We're going to meet them, uh, this this next week, taking the kids to Hawaii. Uh, we'll stop in Disney World or Disneyland on the way, and, uh, then we'll go.

I didn't know people all through the city. Absolutely, absolutely yes. Las Vegas, in terms of its its population, its composition is a lot like Queens.

Um, it, it's. It's a true panoply of immigrant groups, um, drawn by the fact that you can come here, um, and make money. Uh, sort of from the ground up, doing all kinds of things that don't necessarily require an American higher education. It's it's a working class town or immigrants, and because of that, it's a beautiful place for food. Um, conversation and sort of cultural, uh, discovery. Uh, that, that's why, that's really why I like it.

Um, I have thought that it would be a cool place to live, but, uh, never, never took the step.

Yeah, yeah, oh yeah. Exactly why don't they hold Davos in Las Vegas? Who are these joyless technocrats?

Why? why don't they go somewhere fun?

So yesterday, Matt, let's address the elephant in the living room. You had a contentious prosecutorial on their part uh, interview on MSNBC, um, with a very high speed interrogator. Uh, I noticed, uh, uh. He was putting as many words into one minute as I managed to get in in half an hour on this show. Um, yeah.

So I knew right away that was leading to the What happened to you man? critique. Then there was sort of a passage that implied that the story about the IRS visiting my house might not have been true. There was this passage about. Can I fact check that?

But considering that there was information out there to check that, so that so that kind of had me triggered and and but more mostly, um, you know, I I it. It was this, um, very hostile interview, which I expected and, uh it. It was going kind of as I expected. Until he presented me with, um, some mistakes that I had made, and they were, they were errors, like, so let's go through them.

The the first one was a situation where, um, I had, I was looking at a Slack chat and it said EIP, uh, or like from EIP, escalated by CIS. And when I was reading that, um, in the time since I I published, um, that tweet, and now, um, uh, you know, I. I kind of learn more about the Center for Internet Security. And I hadn't yet put two and two together. But in that moment, I realized, Oh God, um, cause I cause. I thought it was a it was a misprint by the Twitter person and that it was actually CISa, it was actually CIS.

And so I I put a missing a there. Now, CIS is still a government contractor. It's it's a mistake, there's no question about it, but it was an honest mistake. I, you know, wouldn't have done it if I, you know, had known, uh, or had had been cognizant of it.

So I, you know, I immediately put a correction up about that. Um, the next one was just the thing where I. I mixed up two elections in my head as I was, um, writing a tweet about the timeline of when the election Integrity Project was formed versus when the Disinformation Governance Board was formed. And got it wrong that the Uh, DGB was before the EIP. So I mixed up a date, so one was one was in 2000 when, and one was in 2020, and one was in 2022. And what happened?

Was I in my? In my head? I thought it was the DGB was before the 2020 election. Um, or I, you know, I had remembered it that way. And when we were going over it, um, we must've just missed it, you know? Um, and that happens, so you transposed.

Yeah, no, I, I. I said that X happened before Y, and it was really Y happened before X.

Well, the I guess they would say that. What I was trying to say, and what I thought at the time was that the EIP had been created after, uh, the collapse of the DGB. Um, and I was, I was saying that. In in in the context of a video from EIP's director, Alex Stamos, who was talking on on camera about how the EIP had been formed. To quote, fill the gaps of what government couldn't do itself. So, um, you know, I, I, that's still true, that that that's the reason that they formed it. They they, you know, uh, deny that. But um, he said what he said, uh, and you can see that from from the list of partners of EIP that that includes CISA. Um, that, you know they. They imagined themselves as a body that was going to be stepping in the shoes of of what the government wasn't able to do.

So, um, but yeah, no, I screwed up a date, you know, there's no question about it that happens. Um, I, you know, in journalism, you make mistakes. So so far, so far.

First of all, I knew that wasn't true because I had personally seen something like thousands of EIP Uh flags just in the Slack chats that I was looking at. Which is a fraction of what overall, um, you know, the the traffic overall to to Twitter. But secondly, if you read the report and you talk to people like Mike Benz, who's the former state cybersecurity guy. Um, under Trump, who has been, you know, very angry about this going back to 2016, wrote a long thing about it. Um, they in their report, they talk about how each incident is. A is a sort of a unique URL incident, so you might have one URL that can be collapsed into thousands of incidents.

Um, so even if they say they're talking, they're only identifying 2,900 individual incidents. We could be talking. The. The number of raw tweets that could be flagged as part of an overall narrative, um, is enormous. Now, um, we're still working out whether there there might've been an error in terms of whether or not that flagging, you know, was external or internal. Um, Benz, you know, I have different people saying different things to me about that. I, I wrote it one way, um, but uh, the 22 million number is real. And they're playing, they're playing semantic games with words like individual incident, um, you know, cascading, right? So narrative.

And, uh, um, what's what's the other one? So so, like individual tweets, um, might be part of cascading narratives that can be collapsed, that's the word they use, collapsed, um, into one incident, so it's complicated, it's. It's exacerbated by the fact that they didn't talk to me, um, before the piece, even though I, I, I reached out to them.

Um, and didn't talk to you before the interview? You mean, no, no, Stanford before the Twitter files? Oh, okay.

Oh, okay, yeah, um, but you know, I. We're still trying to work it out. But they're essentially claiming that that Stanford only flagged 3000 things, which is not true. The algorithmically, they flagged an enormous number of stuff. And you can read read it in their own language in the report. Um, you know, this is one of those things where it might take a while to sort out exactly.

Um, I was trying to refer directly to their language and to the report, uh, so that people could work it out for themselves. Um, but, you know, in the moment, um, you know, I just didn't give a very good answer to that. So those are the three things that they that they keyed on. Now, two of them I've, I've corrected, the third one about the 22 million.

Um, I'm restoring, uh, pending more investigation. I I think it's probably right. Um, at most, it may need some language tweaking. Um, but you know, this, this, this is the result of, like the entire critique of of the Twitter files. This is, this is what happens in journalism.

I mean, as as I'm about to publish today, I think, you know, even going back to my first pieces about Rolling Stone periodical writing, you know, um, any kind of journalism. You're going to get a few things wrong, even if you check. Even with an army of fact checkers and multiple editors at Rolling Stone, we miss some things over the years. Um, even even the famous Golden Sacks piece had some things that, uh, you know, some regrettable language in it. Um, but that's part of the process of journalism is you face your critics.

They if you make mistakes, you own up to them. Uh, and that's how we kind of arrive collectively at, um, you know, at what the truth is now. The thing that irritates me about this is that this is going to be used, as you know, a gotcha to undermine the entire thing. To say that, um, I'm, I'm a hack and I lie. Uh, and all this stuff should be dismissed. When. My whole beef with MSNBC over the years is that I'm one of those reporters who, like lies, awake at night, worrying about stuff like this.

And I'm going to continue to, and I'm going to lose sleep over this vacation, over these little mistakes. Um, while you know huge, enormous things like the Hamilton, 68, uh, go uncorrected on that network, uh, the gall of it is. It has got me in a state of of, um, anger. That's, it's kinda hard to explain, but anyway, I've gone too long. But, uh, it's, it's. It's a gotcha thing. Where they're not engaging in the material, they're being disingenuous about their, the network's own behavior.

Um, and you know, they're trying to just attack me personally rather than go after the stuff, uh, or to talk about the stuff, uh. And that that. That's really upsetting because there was a brief moment where the was interesting, where we were talking about. Um, there was a number that 40 of government requests for moderation had been honored. And he seemed to be arguing that that wasn't a big deal. And I was arguing that it was like, that's the kind of conversation that we should have been having, uh. But instead, it was just, you know, one kind of personal thing after another. And and he's nitpicking little things.

And um, so, anyway.

He's not mine, uh, I don't have to agree with him about everything, I like him personally. I think what he's done with the Twitter files is enormous public service. I think he's done some cool things about, um, opening the source code to the readers.

I think he has a genuine desire to, um, try to engage in some transparency that will, you know, bring back some credibility. Or at least punk pierce the veil of this idea of, um, a single, you know, digitally controlled information network, um. But that doesn't mean I have to agree with him about everything, about his labor practices, about, you know, what else, what he's doing at modern Twitter. And I didn't write anything in the Twitter files that precludes me from turning around and doing a story on Elon. If, if it, if I had to, but at the moment, I don't really feel like it.

Um, I'm sort of positively disposed toward the guy. Moreover, you know, I'm working on a story, uh, where the the point of it is to focus on getting this right. Um, and this question, I think he's asked in bad faith because he's asking me to participate in changing the subject away from my own work. And I refuse to do it, I won't do it.

Um, and he's like, why won't you criticize Elon Musk? I'm like, I don't know, cause I don't want to like, because you know, it's not a it's not a priority. I don't know the particulars. I mean, like, all of those things are.

Elon Musk could be an AX murderer. And it would not change the content of Twitter's archives or the record of their interactions with various organizations. Um, you know, I wasn't the reason that they wanted to break into Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office. So that the person who had leaked the Pentagon papers could be personally attacked. As though that would somehow change the content, uh, or or, or our view of the content. I mean, um, you know, to step back from the minutia of these Um conflicts you had yesterday? Um, uh. The attempt to personalize all news is not getting us anywhere. Um, most of us don't know Elon Musk, but a lot of us are on Twitter.

Most of us don't have maybe even opinions on Elon Musk's opinions on India, let alone opinions of our own. But we do exist in the United States as voters attempting to sort out issues. We do exist as citizens of a state that had various public health policies. In the in the in the Covid moment. That affected us personally and we had to make decisions about whether to get vaccinated, et cetera. Whether this has any bearing whatsoever on Elon Musk's opinions on other countries and their leaderships? Uh, I really doubt, um, but, uh. It's a great way to derail a conversation, it's a great way to, uh uh, attack you by association.

Um, suddenly, you are responsible for the opinions of a man you met very recently.

We all kind of, um, at the beginning, we put searches in about stuff we personally were interested in, and we got documents back based on those searches. Um, that were, they were big, but they were still fairly limited. And because I focused in from the start on Twitter's relationship with, uh, the DHS and the FBI, and what that might mean, and how that information flow worked. Um, which is a was a very hard thing to sort out, um, you know, in a couple of three weeks.

Uh, you know, we incidentally saw some things along the way, um, but we weren't, we didn't have, we weren't looking at a global picture of everything. That's not how the searches worked again. People will will say, well, um, isn't that a a criticism of these reports? Generally? Because maybe you were only looking at things they wanted you to see? But that's true of every, again, that's true of every single news story that that you deal with, that involves sources giving you that stuff. And um, and the things that we were reporting on, we only did reports on stuff that we could demonstrate were self-contained, true news stories in themselves. Uh, in the file.

Right? So, no matter what other context came in, these things were newsworthy. Um, and all of the stuff on the outside. Like, years from now, if you look back, the thing that's going to matter about these stories is where they true or not. Um, and and all this other stuff, why didn't you look at this? why? why aren't you speaking out about that?

Why? why aren't you telling us your personal opinions about this? Like, I'm affirmatively not worried about that stuff where I haven't been. I. I, you know, I may have a bit of an attitude problem about saying that out loud, but I, I just don't think that's part.

Do you have any reason to believe that major news stories, and, um, other topics of concern were suppressed on Twitter? That you don't know about that? Do you have any reason to believe that? Uh, pseudo governmental, governmental and private organizations acting in a concerted fashion, uh, changed the behavior of Twitter that you don't know about. That could absolutely be true. Yeah, how would you go about finding them?

For example, if the Republican National Committee, or the Hoover Institute, or Heritage, or one of these conservative organizations had somehow had held sway over Twitter's operations. Um, do you have any reason to believe that such things happened? uh, and do you think that it might be discovered if they did?

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