Episode 28: "America This Week," with Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn

Secondly, it also suggested that the press has known for a while Brett at least, what the truth is. But he's making it formal for some reason right now. Wray is.

And, you know, I felt after this. And a couple of the articles that quoted the Department of Energy's study, and we were unclear why the Department of Energy was the vehicle for Covid disclosure. But so it was, I thought, here is a case study in a topic and in a notion that was censored. Using all the tools that you've been discovering and writing about in the Twitter files. And you know, people were canceled, silenced, deplatformed their advertising, if they were commercial institutions, attacked and blithely. It turns out that they weren't in fact disinforming anyone, they were informing them earlier than U.S. government. So it's now a crime to be early, it seems.

Wray also by suggesting that this has been known for a long time. Made us think that these people who were being censored in the past weren't being censored sincerely or genuinely for spreading false things, but for spreading true things in advance of an official line. So it was a kind of microcosmic case for me of how this new regime, this new system operates.

And so we're not going to get that 1984 effect, most of us aren't going to get the effect where we just simply don't remember that. We had the exactly opposite opinion about this pretty recently.

But this is an amazing story. There have been some significant signposts on the road along the way. And so you think about it first. In terms of what was said initially, now this is. This is back in early 2020, when we were at the peak of our coronavirus panic. And this was a touchy subject. Mainly because Donald Trump was making all kinds of insinuations about China, and about, you know them, having a hand in this and blaming China for for the virus.

And then this is forgotten, too, that people were very against shutting down travel to and from China. But there was a big pushback in media against the idea that this was anything but a naturally occurring virus. And so you had headlines like, or you had you had passages like this from NPR in April of 2020..

Virus researchers say there is virtually no chance that the new coronavirus was released as a result of a laboratory accident in China or anywhere else. Here's The Washington Post in May of 2021, a year later. Now, they're saying the lab leak possibility, once dismissed as a ridiculous conspiracy theory.

So it, and then there were, there were numerous other stories that that were really interesting. Remember this amazing scene when Anthony Fauci appeared at a festival or fact checking festival in early 2021.?

Right, can you imagine what the what the what the late nights must have been there? This was, and so during this event. Politifact's Katie Sanders asked, Fauci, are you still confident that Covid developed naturally? and Fauci answered No, I'm not convinced of that.

And this is sort of quietly mentioned, and suddenly, you know, this is politifact asking the question, and politifact is run by Pointer, which had already given a quote unquote. Pants on fire rating to somebody to a virologist who had suggested on Tucker Carlson Show that this was a man made virus from a lab. So they had to reverse that rating back then. So we already had a little bit of this kind of touching up of the landscape.

About two years ago, now we have the FBI coming out and saying, Oh, we've. We've been kind of we've. We've long believed, or we've, as you know, we've believed this for a while. But this could be a potential source of the virus. And so now they're going to redo history again, they're going to write all these stories, you know, a new way again, they're. They're not going to say. The lab leak theory initially dismissed events then, you know, begrudgingly allowed, now accepted. You know, it won't be written that way, it'll just be written as though we always thought that, and it's incredibly frustrating.

And now I don't know what's going to happen. You'll have to find some other basis for Covid censorship, I suppose.

But there is a beginning at which they know something the public doesn't. The public is punished for talking about it. Then they decide as an official matter to disclose.

I assume the censorship stops at that point, maybe moves to another target, it being a big machine now that has to feed itself. So maybe, you know, other topics become paramount. But knowing all this, the first question is, why should we believe them now? If we really have actual proof that we're being disingenuous, then it's a conundrum to think that. We are supposed to, at certain points, trust them, and at other points, understand. Though they haven't really given a rationale for their secrecy, we're supposed to understand that their disinformation is good.

They're going to have to come up with. We talked about disinformation, malinformation and misinformation. But they're going to have to come up with a word for what they do. Now, you know, that means good disinformation.

Yeah, free information, or, you know, Demi information, it's half information.

We'll have to, you know. It's as though you saw a murderer run into a closet or a bad person. A Trump person saw a murderer run into a closet and said, He's in there, he's in there. But the investigators go, We don't dare open that closet door. It might prove them right.

No, he's over there on the bed, you can't see him, but we can. Then, later, after the Trump person has gone away or the elections over, they open the door and say, we caught the murderer.

So we started. I started taking more of a look at Geck. I talked to a number of people kind of in that world, and somebody says, Geck is an incubator for the whole disinformation complex, the anti disinformation complex in the West. And what you find is that this goes back to the Obama administration. He created it by executive order, then Congress put it into the NDAA. So it's part of the defense budget. And then there's an inspector general report with a list that's almost entirely redacted. Of like, 39 organizations that are now funded by Geck, and I guess the Department of Defense, secondarily.

There's this thing called Disinfocloud, there's this group called park associates, there's the Information Access Fund.

We've found probably six or seven organizations, and we're going to launch this whole project to try to figure out who else is on that list. I'm told it's probably about 100 organizations long. But the point is, it's not so much about Geck as it is about this whole universe of disinformation groups that have grown up all over the place. Some of them seeded by state money.

And we talked about the Washington Examiner story involving the other Geck-funded organization, the Global Disinformation Index. Which is sort of downranking media organizations so that they get less advertising. Like how that relates to countering foreign disinformation, I'm not sure.

The profits or the income of organizations deemed unhygienic or illicit, or whatever it might be. So in some ways, and you used an example of, you know, sort of rhetorically. How does it help the world that the Daily Wire has its advertising revenue squeezed? But the New York Times does not? Well, I don't know that it helps the world, but the answer to your question, From my perspective, it sure helps the New York Times. But I do think that there is a possibility, perhaps that, in some fashion, the press that we would expect to be reporting on all of this business, the mainstream legacy corporate press that has thus far failed to expose this world. Leaving it to, you know, one, Matt Taibbi and some others. Is actually profiting and in a competitive advantage in this ecosystem. Because there are tools used by NGOs and nonprofits and other entities that actually go after their competitors for them.

Let's say it's Chinese vaccine disinformation. And by the way, the GEC created a report that, and one of their criteria for identifying disinformation was that the virus was engineered in the lab. So they're in the middle of this, too, right? But, but they would create a report like this.

Then they would identify a bunch of names that they say fit this criteria. Of, you know, Chinese disinformation. Then they would give it to a reporter at AP or the Washington Post, or AFP or whatever. And then the reporter goes to the platform and says, Why haven't you deleted Account X yet? because it's Chinese disinformation? I mean, you see how that works.

It's not, it's not terribly sophisticated, but it's it's a. It's a clear effort to involve yourself in the market and in the information landscape. Which they are expressly prohibited from doing domestically, you know? And so that that's interesting, and there's there's a whole lot of history here, that's also really interesting.

But I think the key thing is, America's always done this. We've always had official bodies that were charged with the task of countering foreign disinformation, which does exist. You know, the original one was the OSS.

You've probably met the U.S.IS officer, you know, about whom there's. There are often very many rumors, but, you know, USIA had a legit mission. I think, you know if the Soviets are telling stories and saying that the Americans invented the AIDS virus, or that they're harvesting baby parts? Well, the United States government has certainly has a right to write up a report, put it out on Voice of America, or, you know, publish it. And abroad in the embassies. And that's what USAID did for decades. Then it was closed down.

Then they recreated it in the form of GECC, but it's a totally different model. Instead of doing this public reports, which they did before, right, the cheap. They're now pumping money, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars to God knows what organizations to do, God knows what you know. And that is very different from just simply answering disinformation.

Actually, this list was so big that it crashed when people tried to access it. It's 40,000 names.

And there are, there's so many people on there and a lot of them have, you know, it's like, Jersey girl, you know, Trump, for example, for it, see, whatever. And you contact these people and you start to get again a whiff of a very familiar pattern. The same thing that you found in the Hamilton 68 list. Gosh, there's a lot of elderly Trump supporters on this list.

How did they somehow get in the list of people being suspected Hindu nationalists? That's question a. Question B is, why is a government supported organization in the business of trying to get Twitter to take down people who support Hindu nationalism? Like, why is that even a thing?

What is that?

They believe very strongly in the mission of protecting this country. Maybe in a way that's different than you, or I might think about it.

Terms that are much less ambiguous than what's going on with Geck here again. Geck originally is this interagency group that involves NSA, CIA, SoCOM, Stratcom, AFRICOM, all these other crazy groups. There's all these people who are coming in from all of these parts of the government that are used to really hardcore operations abroad. Now they're involved in this thing.

When you're going to do something like, let's say, I don't know, blow up a terrorist, you want to be pretty sure.

I think they're often not sure enough, but I think these people feel like they want to have a pretty rigorous methodology about this. What Geck is doing is they'll publish a report and they'll say, Okay. We have evidence that these five accounts are linked to the Russian Federation. Then they'll publish the evidence. And you'll say, Wow, okay, well, those things probably are Russian accounts, right? then they'll say, well, but also accounts. And people and groups that can quote generate their own momentum should be considered part of Russia's propaganda ecosystem. If they are in agreement with them, we're publishing the same news stories or sort of echoing the same thoughts.

This is what drives people crazy, this distinction between let's get it right, let's prove it. Then this other thing, this ecosystem idea, which is just let's just lump everybody together. Who might have the same thoughts? And call them all part of an ecosystem, of a propaganda ecosystem. And just start lopping them off in chunks, which is crazy, No?

It sounds like they're trying to treat cancer. They're going in and they're looking for cells that might multiply or infected pieces of tissue. And they're cutting them out before they can infect others. It's kind of a disease model of the American polity.

I would think that if you were a true patriot, you would be rather discomfited by the notion that you have to burn the world.