See all PowerfulJRE transcripts on Youtube

Speaker 1

00:00

The Joe Rogan experience. I've enjoyed your work with the Twitter file. I would enjoy all your work, but I really have enjoyed the Twitter files. That has been some really fascinating views behind the curtain.

Speaker 2

00:14

It's been 1 of the weirder, more surreal experiences of my life, because as a reporter, you're always kind of banging away to try to get 1 little piece of reality, right? You might make 30 or 40 phone calls to get 1 sentence. The Twitter files is, oh, by the way, here, take a laptop and look at 50,000 emails full of all kinds of stuff.

Speaker 2

00:44

So it's, for somebody like me, it's like a dream come true. We get to see all kinds of things, get the answers to questions that we've had for years. And it's been really incredible.

Speaker 1

00:56

Is anything been surprising to you?

Speaker 2

01:02

A little bit. I think going into it, I thought that the relationship between the security agencies like the FBI and the DHS and companies like Twitter and Facebook, I thought it was a little bit less formal. I thought maybe they had kind of an advisory role.

Speaker 2

01:22

And what we find is that it's not that. It's very formalized. They have a really intense structure that they've worked out over a period of years where they have regular meetings, they have a system where the DHS handles censorship requests that come up from the states, and the FBI handles the international ones, and they all float all these companies. And it's a big bureaucracy, and I don't think we expected to see that.

Speaker 1

01:52

It's very bizarre to me that they would just openly call for censorship in emails and these private transmissions, but ones that are easily duplicated, you could send them to other people, it could it can easily get out like that. They're so comfortable with the idea that the government should be involved in this censorship of what turns out to be true information, especially in regards to the Hunter Biden laptop, that they would be so comfortable that they would just send it in emails.

Speaker 2

02:23

Yeah, yeah. Well, I think that shows you the mentality, right? Like that they really genuinely felt that they were impregnable, that they don't have anybody to answer to.

Speaker 2

02:35

I mean a normal person doesn't put incriminating things in emails because we all have the expectation that someday it might come out, you know, But these folks didn't act that way. I mean, you see, I was especially shocked by an email from a staffer for Adam Schiff, the congressperson, the California congressman. And they're just outright saying, we would like you to suspend the accounts of this journalist and anybody who retweets information about this committee. You know, I mean, this is a member of Congress, right?

Speaker 2

03:13

Most of these people have legal backgrounds. They've got lawyers in the office for sure. And this is the House Intelligence Committee. You would think they would have better operational security.

Speaker 2

03:25

Another moment that was shocking to me, there was a, there's an email from an FBI agent named Elvis Chan in San Francisco to Twitter. And they're setting up this signal group, which is going to include all the top sort of censorship executives at all the big companies. And it's a Word document that has all the phone numbers of all these important executives. And the email just, the subject line reads, phone numbers, right, and the word doc is just called secret phone numbers This is how they taught you to do it at Quantico Really, you know, I mean, I mean even a journalist can't miss that.

Speaker 2

04:13

You know what I'm saying? Call it something else, you know, I don't know that that part of it was amazing.

Speaker 1

04:20

It's so strange It's so strange to get such a peak Because I don't think anybody ever anticipated that something like this would happen where Twitter would get sold to an eccentric billionaire who's intent on letting all the information get released?

Speaker 2

04:34

Yeah, I mean, I think Elon Musk essentially, he spent $44 billion to become a whistleblower of his own company. And I mean, I don't really fully know his motives in doing that. I think he's got a pretty developed sense of humor, though.

Speaker 2

04:54

And that comes through. I think he gets a kick out of seeing all this stuff come out on Twitter, which used to be the kind of the private stomping ground of all of these whiny journalists. And now here is all this information that is just horrifying to all of them. I mean, that's a $44 billion is a lot to spend on that thrill, but I'm glad he did.

Speaker 1

05:19

Well, he truly believes that censored social media is a threat to democracy. He really believes that.

Speaker 2

05:26

Absolutely.

Speaker 1

05:27

Yeah, and I believe it too. Yeah. I just don't have $44 billion.

Speaker 1

05:30

Right. Even if I did, I'd be like, I don't want that heat. Brent Barney Right,

Speaker 2

05:34

right. Yeah. I don't think that's what I would spend it on. But no, he believes that.

Speaker 2

05:40

I think he also believes that the credibility of these companies can only be restored by telling people what they talk about in private or what they have been talking about with the government and that sort of thing. So he might be right about that, you know. We'll see, I guess.

Speaker 1

06:04

I think he is. I mean, it's going to be interesting. It's going to be interesting to see how this plays out.

Speaker 1

06:09

There's an amazing amount of resistance against him. And you know, just the publicity campaign against him has been fascinating to watch. People go from thinking that Elon Musk is the savior that's bringing us these amazing electric cars and engineering new reusable rockets to he's an alt-right piece of shit who wants Donald Trump back in the office And it's like, it's very wild.

Speaker 2

06:33

The speed with which they can sort of shuffle somebody into the Hitler of the month club routine, right? Like, you know, we've always done this with foreigners, you know, whether it's Noriega or Saddam Hussein or Milosevic or Assad or whatever it is. We have a playbook for cranking out negative information about foreigners who get in our way for whatever reason.

Speaker 2

07:01

But now we've refined that technique for domestic people who are inconvenient. They did it with Trump, obviously. They tried to do it with Tucker Carlson, with you. You got a taste of that for a few times

Speaker 1

07:19

Yeah, interesting,

Speaker 2

07:20

right and then you know with with Elon Yeah, he went from being the guy who made electric cars sexy to like, you know something to the right of Victor Orban in like 10 seconds. It's amazing.

Speaker 1

07:36

It is amazing and the narrative is spread through progressive people. Well, they'll just say it now. It's like they've reached the memo, the memos got to them and then they just, I hear people in LA, I hear people that I know, like, oh, Elon's just so crazy.

Speaker 1

07:50

It's like, something happened to him, he went nuts and he's a right winger now. Like, how, what are you saying? Like, what examples do you have? Like, they don't have an example.

Speaker 1

07:58

They just have this narrative that reached them the signal. Like, Elon bad now.

Speaker 2

08:02

Oh,

Speaker 1

08:03

Elon bad now, Elon bad now, Elon bad now. And they just start saying it. And you go like, what examples are you using of like his behavior?

Speaker 1

08:10

Well, he let Trump back on the platform Okay, well the Taliban's There

Speaker 2

08:15

right? Yeah, exactly. I don't have

Speaker 1

08:16

a problem with the Taliban. The Taliban just bought blue checkmarks. Do you know that did they really?

Speaker 1

08:21

Yes, didn't know that they're buying blue checkmarks so they could be verified. I'm the real terrorist The fucking Taliban is on and no 1 has a problem with it. The CCP is on Twitter, right? No 1 has a problem with

Speaker 2

08:33

it.

Speaker 1

08:33

But they're like, Trump, they'll let Trump back on. Trump is hilarious. He's a ridiculous person, but don't you think it's better that his tweets get out there and then a bunch of people get to attack him in the tweets.

Speaker 1

08:47

And if those tweets that people attack him with are good, if people are saying good things, then those things get retweeted and liked. And then they rise up to the top of the algorithm. It's all good. Like, you need a Voice against someone like that.

Speaker 1

09:01

You can't have that guy howling into the wind on some QAnon forum and all those wackos Just so they're only talking to each other with no pushback at all If you really don't like Trump you want him on Twitter

Speaker 2

09:12

Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 1

09:13

You want that guy to have some pushback? You want people to be talking against what he's saying you want Twitter the real Twitter now which will actually fact-check everybody they fact-check Biden right they'll fact-check him so he said something stupid they'll go no that's not what's true here's what's true

Speaker 2

09:30

right and that would be good And that was actually for a while Twitter's official policy. They had something called the public interest policy, which specifically laid out exactly what you said. Like when a world leader, no matter who it is, says anything, we want it to be out there because we want it to be debated.

Speaker 2

09:50

We want people to see it. We want people to talk about it. We want people to reach conclusions about it. And 1 of the things that we found in the Twitter files was After January 6th, there was this intense debate within the company where they were basically saying, oh, thank God we're going to repeal the public interest policy or we're going to poke a hole in it, right?

Speaker 2

10:13

No longer have that belief system that just because somebody is a world leader, we need to hear what they have to say. So they invented a new policy called glorification of violence or they they called it that and Essentially what they said was you had to look at Trump not in terms of each individual tweet but in terms of what they called the context surrounding his whole career, all the people who followed him, whether or not they were violent, whether or not they said the things that were offensive. It's like the speech version of stochastic terrorism. I don't know if you've ever heard that term.

Speaker 2

10:56

Stochastic terrorism is this idea that you can incite people to violence by saying things that aren't specifically inciting but are statistically likely to create somebody who will do something violent even if it's not individually predictable. That's what they did with Trump. They basically invented this concept that, yes, he may not have actually incited violence, but the whole totality of his persona is inciting. So we're going to strike him.

Speaker 2

11:31

And so they sort of massively expanded the purview of things they can censor just in that 1 moment. And you can see it in these dialogues, how they came to that decision, which is just fascinating.

Speaker 1

11:46

And they've never come out and said, we were misinformed. That is not the case. There really wasn't this crazy collusion between Russia and Donald Trump.

Speaker 1

11:56

And in fact, there was some information that seems to point to that Hillary Clinton had involvement with Russia too. And that they've kind of all had involvement with Russia. And this wasn't some grand conspiracy to elect a Russian puppet as the President of the United States. Sorry.

Speaker 2

12:13

Yeah, it was a 3 and a half year sort of mass hysteria experiment. And I mean, this is 1 of the things, it's 1 of the reasons I got kind of quietly moved out of mainstream journalism. I didn't have a particular problem at Rolling Stone, but early on in the Trump years, I said, there's something wrong with the story.

Speaker 2

12:42

I think there are elements of it that aren't provable. I don't think we should be running this stuff, you know? And then, before I knew it, I was working independently. But anyway, at the Twitter files, we're finding stuff that now tells you absolutely what actually the truth was during that time.

Speaker 2

13:03

Like for instance, 1 of the big Russiagate stories was from early 2018 when Devin Nunes, remember the, he was the Republican Congressman. He was the head of the house intelligence committee at the time. He wrote a memo basically saying, we think they faked FISA applications. We think the FBI used the Steele dossier to try to get surveillance authority against some Trump people like Carter Page.

Speaker 2

13:35

And we think they lied and cheated to do that. And so he submitted this classified memo. And not only was he denounced everywhere as a liar and wrong and all that, But there was this big story that was all over the place that a hashtag, hashtag release the memo, had been amplified by Russian bots. You probably don't remember this, but this story was everywhere in January and February of 2018.

Speaker 2

14:07

This idea that release the memo was basically a Russian operation and that Nunes was benefiting from it. Well, I'm reading the Twitter files, I was looking for something else entirely, and then suddenly we come across a string of emails internally at Twitter, where the Twitter officials are saying, you know, we're not finding any Russians at all behind this hashtag. And we told the members of Congress who asked about this, that there are no Russians involved in this, because Dianne Feinstein, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, they all came out with this accusation about it being linked to Russia. We told them that there's nothing there and they went and they did it anyway.

Speaker 2

14:57

And so there are lots of stories like that now that are kind of falling apart, right?