Matt Taibbi — Independent journalist, former Rolling Stone writer, and one of the reporters granted access to the internal 'Twitter Files' after Elon Musk's acquisition.
The gist
Matt Taibbi joins Joe Rogan to discuss what he found inside the Twitter Files, describing a surprisingly formalized censorship apparatus connecting the FBI, DHS, and major social media platforms. They trace how mainstream journalism shifted from adversarial truth-seeking into what Taibbi calls a propaganda machine that protects power rather than questioning it. The conversation covers government use of informants (Proud Boys, the Whitmer plot), discredited media narratives like Russiagate and WMDs, and search-engine suppression of inconvenient stories. They also examine the World Economic Forum, the decline of legacy outlets like CNN and the New York Times, and how independent media on platforms like Substack and YouTube is changing the incentives for young journalists.
Big reveals
- Twitter Files show a highly formalized structure where DHS handles domestic censorship requests and the FBI handles international ones, with regular meetings across companies.
- An FBI agent (Elvis Chan) set up a Signal group of top censorship executives, sending a Word doc literally titled 'secret phone numbers.'
- After January 6, Twitter repealed its 'public interest policy' and invented a 'glorification of violence' rule to ban Trump based on the totality of his persona.
- Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio was a prolific informant for federal and local law enforcement; in the Whitmer kidnapping case 12 of 14 involved were FBI informants.
- Twitter internally found no Russians behind the #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag and told members of Congress, who pushed the Russia claim publicly anyway.
- Jann Wenner told Taibbi to stop covering the Russia story, an early sign he had no future at Rolling Stone.
- Google's 2017 'Project Owl' reweighted search toward 'authoritative' sources, pushing mainstream outlets above niche or independent sites.
- No mainstream outlet has covered the substance of the Twitter Files, and Wikipedia won't accept it because it lacks a 'recognized' source.
Things worth remembering
- Taibbi says Elon Musk essentially spent $44 billion to become 'a whistleblower of his own company.'
- The Proud Boys started as a joke on Anthony Cumia's radio show involving Gavin McInnes and a bit about a musical.
- Gavin McInnes is now persona non grata in the Proud Boys he founded, kicked out of a meeting in Vegas.
- The media took years to admit the WMD story was wrong, largely scapegoating Judy Miller while others who got it wrong were promoted.
- Jesse Ventura lost his MSNBC show for being anti-war and now lives in a Mexico compound he calls 'Casa MSNBC.'
- CNN+ was cancelled after three weeks despite hundreds of millions of dollars spent launching it.
- Taibbi and Rogan note DuckDuckGo and Bing surfaced a vaccine-related doctor death story that Google appeared to suppress.
- The World Economic Forum was founded in 1971 by Klaus Schwab and is mostly funded by ~1,000 member companies with over $5 billion in turnover.
- Rogan says he gained 2 million subscribers in a month during the Spotify controversy, with the publicity valued around $300 million.
- Rogan had a childhood paper route in Newton delivering the New York Times, Boston Globe, and Boston Herald 365 days a year.