Episode 30: "America This Week," with Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn

Oh yeah.

Normally, my whole life is organized around the sports calendar, but the last three weeks have been disrupted. The last three months have disrupted that flow so much. This is normally the biggest week of the year for me because it's NFL free agency. I usually spend the entire week doing nothing but scrolling Twitter to see who the Patriots have signed. And speculating and worrying about it, and watching highlight videos of obscure.

58th men on the roster. That kind of thing. But I actually have a job now, so I'm estranged from the sports calendar, but it's going on in Vegas.

I place bets maybe once a year and I only do them if my son recommends them. So I'll be calling him up and getting some tips on the basketball world and trying to make a.

How much does a candy bar cost at a casino these days?

Once candy bars broke the dollar, the $1 line, I realized I was in a new world and was headed for the grave. Because I just can't imagine paying more. But casinos are able, like airports, able to charge almost anything, depending on what the market will bear. Right now. With the tournament, you get $1,000 hotels that were $50 hotels, hotel rooms. I don't go outside during this time.

Highly recommend it, especially if you get a press pass.

You can either support socialized medicine or give up your health care plan, or walk out of here with a hand. That kind of thing, it's Harry Reid or whoever it is, I don't know Vegas does.

It doesn't seem like a fun scene to me.

The problem with Davos is that you can't park a yacht next to the meeting like you can at the Cannes Film Festival or something. And not being able to park yachts nearby limits the amount of vice you can engage in.

Anyway.

Facebook, Google, TikTok, YouTube.

Pinterest Medium, Twitter.

Which is significant enough, right? You would think that would be an antitrust issue, like some other stuff in there. And then the second thing is. They specifically outlined from the very beginning that true stories that promote hesitancy were something they defined officially as standard. Misinformation on your platform. And so this thread that we did is basically we went through every instance of what we could find of them, defining true things as disinformation or misinformation or malinformation. And the takeaway that you come from this is that they really, this is an innovation.

It's a new evolution of the disinformation process, away from trying to figure out what's true and what's not, and just going directly to political narrative.

With the EIP, they openly described themselves as partners of CISA.

And we thought it was interesting because we found in the Twitter files, we'd find these emails that, say, from CISA, escalated by EIP.

They tried to create the Disinformation Governance Board. Remember with that crazy woman, Nina Jankowicz, the Mary Poppins person?

Hasn't she recently been panhandling on social media for legal fee help?

The next day, the DHS Secretary, Mayorkas, announced that they had just created a disinformation governance board with Nina Jankowicz at the head of it. But this idea of having a.

Universal single digital processing ticketing system that touches all the networks, including the alternative ones like Getter and Parler, etc.

Etc.

Takes in all the content and the scary thing from the point of view of a free speech purist, here, there's a lot of scary things. But you could say something and get banned for it on one platform, and now all the other platforms know about that. And so your history will be fed into this big computer. It's kind of like the credit score system.

They approached Twitter in early 2021 about signing on to this thing. They give them an onboarding packet, they have to log in to this thing called Jira, which they have internally. They have their own Jira system inside Twitter, which is just a program that helps you decide what content to ban. But now they have a big jira.

It's like a global Jira, and they start sending out reports about themes that they want to address. And I'm not a big Covid person, I never got spun up about this issue. I got the shot.

I didn't really spend a lot of time worrying about it, except from the speech angle. But reading through these stories for the first time really gave me a serious pause about a lot of these stories and made me wonder if I had been very seriously misinformed. Because they made a conscious effort to suppress true stories of people who had had vaccine injury, vaccine side effects, who died after vaccines, celebrity deaths after vaccines. There was a school closure in upstate New York where a bunch of teachers got sick after getting the vaccine, and they wanted to suppress that story.

And.

So this group took these true stories and.

They won't skirt around it, they won't say possible, they'll say this is a true story.

For instance, there was a leak of.

What they call the cyber attack some hacker got hold of some documents.

In Europe, showing that the rollout of the AstraZeneca vaccine hadn't been accompanied with serious side effects and blood clots. And they characterized that as a cyber attack, and they admit that it's a true story. But they framed it as a disinformation event because the wrong people were retweeting it. And this is a key concept that they keep coming back to, which is they're not looking at truth versus untruth, they're looking at the political consequence of the story. And one of the first ways that they figure out whether a thing is on-narrative or off-narrative is who's retweeting the story. If RFK Jr.

Is retweeting the story. And they had this incredible, terrifying phrase to describe well-known offenders like RFK Jr.

I should read this because this is so scary. For some reason, nobody else thought this was as bad as I did. But here it is the known repeat offenders false or misleading posts from the accounts of well-known repeat offenders, such as Robert F. Kennedy. This is a large volume of content that is almost always reportable, so what they're saying is basically anything that Robert F. Kennedy says is almost always going to be reportable.

They're working backwards from who the person is to decide whether or not that's a good story in another instance.

It's not as though he has a record or criminal record, or has been proven to be a liar. In some fashion, it's only because he's spoken on inconvenient or unapproved.

Truths in the past.

In other words, what makes you an offender, and thus then a repeat offender, is that you piss them off. Or strayed from the narrative in the past.

It's not proceeding from any basic criticism or critique of Robert Kennedy.

Extravagantly wrong, these folks, they are continually mistaken about all kinds of things. But I wanted to read first this, this thing that they cited as an example of how they respond to certain news stories. So there's a disinformation event in their weekly bulletin. And it says after CDC changes its methodology for counting COVID-19 cases among vaccinated people, anti-vaccine activists push vaccine efficacy concerns. Then there's a little bullet point.

It says the CDC announced that COVID-19 cases among vaccinated people will only be counted if they require hospitalization or result in death. To maintain better data on quote breakthrough cases post-vaccination. Now, this is in the period when they were still not. They still didn't know that breakthrough cases were incredibly common and that the vaccine wasn't terribly effective in preventing transmission. And so they were in this sort of netherworld.

To prevent you from getting the disease. So when the CDC did this, because they were clearly trying to drive down the number of Covid cases, breakthrough cases among the vaccinated, so they only did this change for vaccinated people. Naturally, it says. You know, the top ten posts on this from a Medical Freedom Instagram account received 7,000 likes.

The Children's Health Defense also published an article and was subsequently tweeted by anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Another popular YouTube video from anti-vaccine activist What's Her Face? has been viewed over 60,000 times. Take away. The decision to be restrictive in counting breakthrough cases is seen as hypocrisy, and among some communities suggestive of a cover-up, which it is. But, like, you can read that a couple of ways, as this is a subtle way of telling people that the C.D.C maybe shouldn't have done that. But that's not the guidance that they're giving to these platforms, the platforms are the guidance they're getting.

Is this isn't so good for the CDC? It's encouraging hesitancy, it's empowering. Robert F. Kennedy. It's making us look like hypocrites, and they're using words like hypocrisy that we don't like.

Total information on the situation is now itself becoming a second order sin. You know? In other words, if the first order sin is reporting true stuff that we don't want, the second order sin is starting to talk about the fact that.

If you have any doubts, and if you show interest in stories, that might raise your doubts.

This is a disinformation event. And why are they worried about this? Because they are not focused on true vs. untrue, they are intensely focused on the question of authority and obedience. So there is an amazing report by one of the partners of the Virality project, which is this company.

Grafica and Grafica is a DOD funded, DARPA partnered organization run by a guy named Ben Nimmo, who used to be a NATO press secretary. And they ran a piece called Fohe, that joke that people were making F o u x I about Anthony Fauci.

Undermining authoritative health sources.

The June 1st release of thousands of Dr. Anthony Fauci's emails gave the public a glimpse into the challenges experienced by U.S. government officials in the early days of the pandemic. They alleged some alleged that they revealed deep ties to the Chinese government, dishonesty in public communications about the lab leak.

And otherwise nefarious intentions for prolonging the pandemic and lying to the public now. This was bad, they said.

They say this tactic is not incidental. For years, incentivized influencers have repeatedly undermined and delegitimized authoritative health sources, public health institutions and health experts. This continual process of seeding doubt and uncertainty in authoritative voices leads to a society that finds it too challenging to identify what's true or false.

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