You're a real canary in the coalmine Matt - now the public can only deny the intimidation tactics of the US corporation through willful ignorance. So happy at least you could get on The Hill and share your story. Hang in there.
The canary is in Belmarsh maximum security prison in London. His name is Julian Assange and those two words tell you everything you need to know about the US and UK and by extension the rest of the neocolonial western world. Colonialism never ended, they just use economic hit Men and sanctions if that doesn't work and military as a last resort if the foreign leaders won't be compradors and Quisling Dreck. When offered lead or gold, most choose Gold. If you look at the hanging of Saddam or the rape by bayonet of Mummar Gaddafi you'll understand WHY Kim will never give up his nukes.
''At one moment during the negotiations, the U.S. representatives told the Taliban, 'either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs','' Brisard said in an interview in Paris.
I got a head full ideas driving me insane. Here’s one. The cringetastic Krystal ball RFK interview was critiqued by a myriad of alternative media sources. All expressed my view to one degree or another. Super cool. But the interview ended with RFK being asked about his day one objectives if elected. Without hesitation he stated he would free Assange. No one covered that part. No one. If alternative media can’t connect the propagandistic media to Assange’s incarceration then how can anyone get it up for the twitter files, Syria, Ukraine, etc. I have historically had contempt for one issue voters. I’m going to make an exception for Bobby. Because that issue is every issue.
It's the best show in the genre. It's the not-too-deep dive into the daily news cycle, so it gets frivolous at times, but you have a leftist and a libertarian who are both honest and civil and have a good rapport. They also agree on more than they disagree on.
I'm about half and half socialist and libertarian, so I watch clips most days.
Pretty creepy that Stacey Plaskett-"Case," Mehdi Hasan, and the IRS all played a role in would-be intimidating Mr Taibbi. In the IRS case: Talk about the "Weaponization of Government!"
Hehe,15 years ago I was working at a "non-profit" "non-governmental entity", that was both almost entirely government funded and took most of our direction from elected officials.
The abuse of power floors me. I dont know why, after everything that has been exposed, this level of abuse and intimidation blows me away. I would love the transparent exposure of who flipped the switch for the IRS investigation, and who collaborated. Of course they are insulated to the teeth when it comes to this shit. No accountability is their strength
Being targeted for an at home visit from the IRS on the day you release something the FBI doesn't like "abuse"?
>The IRS hasn't *done* anything to Matt.
Sure they have, wasted his time and caused him stress. The "coincidence" is absolutely 100% evidence.
If my business partner who I hate and lives in Austin is mysteriously murdered on a day I flew to Austin, that absolutely is "evidence". Circumstantial evidence is evidence.
It is not as good as a voice recording of a phone call form an FNI agent to his buddy at the IRS. But that may not even exist.
You're begging the question by using the term "targeted". There's no evidence of targeting.
"The "coincidence" is absolutely 100% evidence."
No, that's not what "evidence" means, sorry. It may be convincing to you, but that doesn't make it evidence.
"If my business partner who I hate and lives in Austin is mysteriously murdered on a day I flew to Austin, that absolutely is "evidence". Circumstantial evidence is evidence."
Sure, that's circumstantial evidence, but it bears no relation to this IRS visit. In your hypothetical, a crime has been committed, and motive has been clearly established.
There's no crime here (sorry, but "stress" and "wasted time" are just natural by-products of dealing with the government, not malfeasance or criminal behavior), there's no established motive (just vague insinuation), and there's a much more reasonable and obvious explanation for what's happening: the IRS just got handed a huge bundle of cash, and they're using it to revisit old cases which weren't handled competently.
A) I can see this back-and-forth is going nowhere.
B) No, motive has not been established, as evidenced here by your failure to present a plausible motive.
I'm the one advocating that we don't jump to conclusions without evidence. It's still totally plausible that the IRS *did* target Matt... there's just not any evidence.
There's nothing "dispassionate" about assuming people are out to get you at every turn (recall that Matt just recently had a public freakout over Facebook "censoring" him, in what turned out to be a completely innocuous bug that affected people who hadn't even posted anything).
The odds of this being unrelated is highly improbable. I would simply like to know how many people got an in person visit on Christmas Eve, and how many of those people had never been contacted prior regarding a concern.Let’s just start with this and work our way through it. Lee Fang I have a suggestion for your next article
What are the odds, roughly, of "this being unrelated"? 1%? 0.1%? 50%? You have no idea, and neither do I.
Matt is often in the news, and very often controversial. It's not a crazy coincidence he'd be saying or publishing something controversial on any given day of the year. You can construct a post-hoc narrative about how unlikely this all is, but without real evidence and facts, it's just speculation.
It's just that you believe that it was only a coincidence of timing and nothing nefarious. That seems incredibly naive to me. Or you have some reason to blindly believe the IRS explanations of the strange timing. It's blatantly obvious to most of us on this chat and it surprises me that some don't see it.
I understand it seems obvious to you. For people who like to see *evidence*, the lack of evidence is a sticking point.
And, seriously, evidence of what? The IRS hasn't done or threatened to do *anything* to Matt. They simply paid him a visit, which kind of makes sense given that 1) Matt says IRS owes him money, and 2) IRS says they're concerned Matt was the victim of identity theft. I hope I don't have to spell this out for you.
Like Taibbi, Greenwald, Carlson, etc., they both strike me as ideological astroturfers, using for-public-consumption political identities to defend and justify the right wing political movement in the US.
I have no evidence to support that view, just my own observation, so I understand if you happen to disagree. They just don't strike me as genuine.
It does indicate that the festering sore in the IRS was more than just Lois Lerner. Lois took the heat for the deep state to survive. I wonder if the IRS agent who visited would have said "that's a nice form 1040, you got here, Mr. Taibbi. Sure be a shame if something happened to it."
At some point the intersection of the Censorship Industrial Complex and the 2024 election will require journalism's attention. The sooner the better. I was hoping the co-hosts would bring this up.
This is a truly great idea. What if other voices had a platform? And it was preserved in some way so people could access?
Democrats and The Ballot Harvesting Industrial Complex have a firm grip on 2024. But wouldn't it be delicious to have other ideas out there before lock down.
That would be newsworthy especially if the major candidates declined. Might need more than one debate which would disrupt the POTUS debate status quo. They could start with the lesser candidates and do a debate ladder.
Well done, Matt, you appeared a bit edgy in this interview but if I had been served an IRS notice on my front door, I would feel the same way. I have my own IRS story on being audited out of the blue. They can make your life miserable with a "guilty until proven innocent" approach but in my case, I did prevail.
The IRS is not saying "guilty until proven innocent", though. In fact, they're not saying "guilty" at all. They've made no accusations, no threats, taken no punitive action... nothing.
If you buy their explanation (which... meh, who knows), they're working to protect *Matt* from identity theft. That's about as much as we know. The rest is just speculation and ad-hoc hypothesizing about the meanings of certain dates.
I saw it shared on the Viva and Barnes Law community. Seems like Brianna might have changed the tune of 'can't you find all the dirty Trump deeds or evil Republican shenanigans?' Hey, I learned from the best writers like Chris Hedges, Thomas Frank, You, Glenn and expanded to many others to jump to my conclusions Matt. =) I've found a lot more support with Populists like Robert Barnes, legal foundations that provide mental strength. There is no left and right populism. It's We the People vs. The Robots.
I struggle to understand BJG”s initial take on the twitter files. It was so petty and seemed like mental gymnastics to find fault with a billionaire defending the first amendment. If Charlie Manson cured cancer I’d like to believe we could table our other grievances for a minute.
I understood Brianha's take and I lost my temper on her show mainly because I was struggling to explain what I was doing. My calculation about the Twitter Files was that getting the material was the priority, even if that meant some awkward public contortions. There was a certainly a little bit of a leap of faith involved, that I wasn't getting some things wrong - like that there was more moderation of conservative/Republican content than on the left, at least domestically - but pretty much any journalism involves betting on your interpretation of things. You're always gambling that one source or set of sources is more right than another. So for instance, the line that she had issues with, that Democrats had wider access to the content moderation machine inside Twitter, I had some pretty good sources on that in addition to the overall impression from looking at the material. Perhaps someday there will be a bigger release of the files, or internal data will come out, and that will be proved wrong. I don't think so, but it could happen. But there are always some uncertainties in reporting. On the other front, I guessed (in hindsight correctly) that the project was on a clock and that we had a finite amount of searches and went straight for the topic I thought was most explosive, i.e. the intel ties, out of fear we wouldn't get another shot at it. So, it's true that I didn't search for suppression of the left. But I wasn't really looking for suppression of the right, either. There were a lot of gray areas with this situation, but in the end it came down to, did we want to see this stuff or not? I did the best I could to get the most we could get.
You guys crushed it. I’m forever grateful. I personally thought it would reveal icky things about the folks at twitter. Instead they were more like patty hearst. In that space many turned into a purity test on Elon. I’ll never understand that. It diffused the reporting’s impact. Weirdly enough, republicans saw fit to have hearings. Will it ever produce consequences for anyone?
Yeah I almost wonder if it would have been better for everyone if Elon had pretended the files were stolen/hacked. His direct involvement didn't seem to help him or the journalists achieve their goals.
I agree wholeheartedly with Chuck on being grateful. The number of people I urged to check out your Twitter feed, who then learned some things they weren't seeing on CNNMSNBC, is large. And I'm sure they told someone, and after that it's that old shampoo commercial. thanks man.
You're a real canary in the coalmine Matt - now the public can only deny the intimidation tactics of the US corporation through willful ignorance. So happy at least you could get on The Hill and share your story. Hang in there.
The canary is in Belmarsh maximum security prison in London. His name is Julian Assange and those two words tell you everything you need to know about the US and UK and by extension the rest of the neocolonial western world. Colonialism never ended, they just use economic hit Men and sanctions if that doesn't work and military as a last resort if the foreign leaders won't be compradors and Quisling Dreck. When offered lead or gold, most choose Gold. If you look at the hanging of Saddam or the rape by bayonet of Mummar Gaddafi you'll understand WHY Kim will never give up his nukes.
Wow. Harsh and straightforward. Nothing I can argue with. This is why I love Matt's comments section.
''At one moment during the negotiations, the U.S. representatives told the Taliban, 'either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs','' Brisard said in an interview in Paris.
https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/pol/wtc/uspolicytalibanoil111501.html
I call this tactic, "the standard offer"
I got a head full ideas driving me insane. Here’s one. The cringetastic Krystal ball RFK interview was critiqued by a myriad of alternative media sources. All expressed my view to one degree or another. Super cool. But the interview ended with RFK being asked about his day one objectives if elected. Without hesitation he stated he would free Assange. No one covered that part. No one. If alternative media can’t connect the propagandistic media to Assange’s incarceration then how can anyone get it up for the twitter files, Syria, Ukraine, etc. I have historically had contempt for one issue voters. I’m going to make an exception for Bobby. Because that issue is every issue.
Twitter Files are infinitely bigger scandal than Watergate.
Total silence of State media on Twitter Files is alarming and State Security and IRS are completely out of control.
PROTECT Matt Taibbi and free Julian Assange !!
Let me get this straight:
Your hypothesis is, the federal government is openly targeting Matt via the IRS...
...but the silence of what you term "State media" is alarming to you?
Dumbass.
Our local paid troll. Dwhy, has reported for duty ;-))
How come they didn't keep interrupting you? Who are these people? Why are they allowed on teevee?
Because Taibbi is not RFK Jr, The Hill is not Breaking Points, and Briahna is not Krystal.
Yeah, I had to cancel my sub to Breaking Points after that RFK Jr debacle. What a disappointment Krystal turned out to be.
Well said
Although Saagar was actually good and balanced on resent Greenwald episode...
Krystal is a MAJOR disappointment -- ever since the horrible mistreatment of Jimmy Dore.
I like Saagar better but not enough to keep the sub. Maybe I’ll spend the money on a worthy Substack or Jimmy Dore.
FYi - Krystal just married (this month) the very symbol of DNC controlled opposition -- the odious Kyle Kulinsky
👻👻👻👻👻🤗🤗🤗😹😹😹😹
It's the best show in the genre. It's the not-too-deep dive into the daily news cycle, so it gets frivolous at times, but you have a leftist and a libertarian who are both honest and civil and have a good rapport. They also agree on more than they disagree on.
I'm about half and half socialist and libertarian, so I watch clips most days.
Great interview, Matt! I'm really glad The Hill featured you properly. Kudos to The Hill and to you.
Stay safe and healthy, Matt.
State Security and Dept. of Justice are completely out of control.
With infinite gratitude your admirer and supporter for decades.
Pretty creepy that Stacey Plaskett-"Case," Mehdi Hasan, and the IRS all played a role in would-be intimidating Mr Taibbi. In the IRS case: Talk about the "Weaponization of Government!"
Lol, this was first on my feed.
It's so interesting that the euphemism game is so very shallow in America, and yet the majority of people are fooled, maybe willingly?
What is a public private partnership?
What is a non government organization that is funded by the government?
What is a regulatory body that's funded by the private sector?
What was the Latin root of Mussolini's fascista?
What economic ideas built every attempted totalitarian society in modernity?
I once was lost, but not due to willful ignorance. Just ignorance.
It's hard to have these conversations with true believers, but necessary as our technology has transformed our society into a myth craving monster....
No longer stuck with jumbo shrimp and defense intelligence as the typical oxymorons. Thanks for filling up the coffers!
Hehe,15 years ago I was working at a "non-profit" "non-governmental entity", that was both almost entirely government funded and took most of our direction from elected officials.
Was always confusing to explain to people.
Once you start to see the house of cards, it's really hard to keep a sunny disposition regarding any form of centralized power imo.
That's a big reason I've been such a fan of Walter Kirn and the literature segments on Taibbi's pod.
Whatever dignity remains for humanity, it will come from one human being helping another - or *maybe* a small group....
Thanks, Matt. We're a nation run by criminals watched over by quislings.
The corruption is so bold and brazen! It's breathtaking.
The abuse of power floors me. I dont know why, after everything that has been exposed, this level of abuse and intimidation blows me away. I would love the transparent exposure of who flipped the switch for the IRS investigation, and who collaborated. Of course they are insulated to the teeth when it comes to this shit. No accountability is their strength
Where's the abuse, exactly?
The IRS hasn't *done* anything to Matt. There's no evidence or factual basis to support the targeting narrative. It's just insinuation and guesswork.
>Where's the abuse, exactly?
Being targeted for an at home visit from the IRS on the day you release something the FBI doesn't like "abuse"?
>The IRS hasn't *done* anything to Matt.
Sure they have, wasted his time and caused him stress. The "coincidence" is absolutely 100% evidence.
If my business partner who I hate and lives in Austin is mysteriously murdered on a day I flew to Austin, that absolutely is "evidence". Circumstantial evidence is evidence.
It is not as good as a voice recording of a phone call form an FNI agent to his buddy at the IRS. But that may not even exist.
You're begging the question by using the term "targeted". There's no evidence of targeting.
"The "coincidence" is absolutely 100% evidence."
No, that's not what "evidence" means, sorry. It may be convincing to you, but that doesn't make it evidence.
"If my business partner who I hate and lives in Austin is mysteriously murdered on a day I flew to Austin, that absolutely is "evidence". Circumstantial evidence is evidence."
Sure, that's circumstantial evidence, but it bears no relation to this IRS visit. In your hypothetical, a crime has been committed, and motive has been clearly established.
There's no crime here (sorry, but "stress" and "wasted time" are just natural by-products of dealing with the government, not malfeasance or criminal behavior), there's no established motive (just vague insinuation), and there's a much more reasonable and obvious explanation for what's happening: the IRS just got handed a huge bundle of cash, and they're using it to revisit old cases which weren't handled competently.
There's just nothing here.
A) You don't understand what evidence is.
B) No motive has been established? That is rich.
Clearly you have made up you mind on this issue and don't really care to think about it dispassionately. Have a nice day.
A) I can see this back-and-forth is going nowhere.
B) No, motive has not been established, as evidenced here by your failure to present a plausible motive.
I'm the one advocating that we don't jump to conclusions without evidence. It's still totally plausible that the IRS *did* target Matt... there's just not any evidence.
There's nothing "dispassionate" about assuming people are out to get you at every turn (recall that Matt just recently had a public freakout over Facebook "censoring" him, in what turned out to be a completely innocuous bug that affected people who hadn't even posted anything).
The odds of this being unrelated is highly improbable. I would simply like to know how many people got an in person visit on Christmas Eve, and how many of those people had never been contacted prior regarding a concern.Let’s just start with this and work our way through it. Lee Fang I have a suggestion for your next article
What are the odds, roughly, of "this being unrelated"? 1%? 0.1%? 50%? You have no idea, and neither do I.
Matt is often in the news, and very often controversial. It's not a crazy coincidence he'd be saying or publishing something controversial on any given day of the year. You can construct a post-hoc narrative about how unlikely this all is, but without real evidence and facts, it's just speculation.
And so of course the IRS would choose to pay his family a visit on Christmas eve 2022 concerning a 2018 concern about identity theft. Sure.
You have swallowed the cool aid. Tasty?
So you have no meaningful response, noted. Thanks for nothing.
It's just that you believe that it was only a coincidence of timing and nothing nefarious. That seems incredibly naive to me. Or you have some reason to blindly believe the IRS explanations of the strange timing. It's blatantly obvious to most of us on this chat and it surprises me that some don't see it.
I understand it seems obvious to you. For people who like to see *evidence*, the lack of evidence is a sticking point.
And, seriously, evidence of what? The IRS hasn't done or threatened to do *anything* to Matt. They simply paid him a visit, which kind of makes sense given that 1) Matt says IRS owes him money, and 2) IRS says they're concerned Matt was the victim of identity theft. I hope I don't have to spell this out for you.
I think Rising is now (without Ryan Grim) a decent show. In my opinion, much better than Breaking Points with its MSM adjacent equivocation.
Translation: "not right-wing enough yet"
Like Taibbi, Greenwald, Carlson, etc., they both strike me as ideological astroturfers, using for-public-consumption political identities to defend and justify the right wing political movement in the US.
I have no evidence to support that view, just my own observation, so I understand if you happen to disagree. They just don't strike me as genuine.
It does indicate that the festering sore in the IRS was more than just Lois Lerner. Lois took the heat for the deep state to survive. I wonder if the IRS agent who visited would have said "that's a nice form 1040, you got here, Mr. Taibbi. Sure be a shame if something happened to it."
I don’t know whether to cry or laugh. But you nailed it.
At some point the intersection of the Censorship Industrial Complex and the 2024 election will require journalism's attention. The sooner the better. I was hoping the co-hosts would bring this up.
And then I get this link
https://youtu.be/0JO0LEeIi_E
Wouldnt it be fun if Megyn Kelly set up a debate betweem Vivek and RFK Jr and it got more views than a Uniparty debate. Imagine the conniption.
This is a truly great idea. What if other voices had a platform? And it was preserved in some way so people could access?
Democrats and The Ballot Harvesting Industrial Complex have a firm grip on 2024. But wouldn't it be delicious to have other ideas out there before lock down.
As a result of all the likes I have emailed Megyn with the idea.
That would be newsworthy especially if the major candidates declined. Might need more than one debate which would disrupt the POTUS debate status quo. They could start with the lesser candidates and do a debate ladder.
Keep up the Journalism keep pushing the buttons of the Elites that own our Government
Well done, Matt, you appeared a bit edgy in this interview but if I had been served an IRS notice on my front door, I would feel the same way. I have my own IRS story on being audited out of the blue. They can make your life miserable with a "guilty until proven innocent" approach but in my case, I did prevail.
The IRS is not saying "guilty until proven innocent", though. In fact, they're not saying "guilty" at all. They've made no accusations, no threats, taken no punitive action... nothing.
If you buy their explanation (which... meh, who knows), they're working to protect *Matt* from identity theft. That's about as much as we know. The rest is just speculation and ad-hoc hypothesizing about the meanings of certain dates.
I saw it shared on the Viva and Barnes Law community. Seems like Brianna might have changed the tune of 'can't you find all the dirty Trump deeds or evil Republican shenanigans?' Hey, I learned from the best writers like Chris Hedges, Thomas Frank, You, Glenn and expanded to many others to jump to my conclusions Matt. =) I've found a lot more support with Populists like Robert Barnes, legal foundations that provide mental strength. There is no left and right populism. It's We the People vs. The Robots.
I struggle to understand BJG”s initial take on the twitter files. It was so petty and seemed like mental gymnastics to find fault with a billionaire defending the first amendment. If Charlie Manson cured cancer I’d like to believe we could table our other grievances for a minute.
I understood Brianha's take and I lost my temper on her show mainly because I was struggling to explain what I was doing. My calculation about the Twitter Files was that getting the material was the priority, even if that meant some awkward public contortions. There was a certainly a little bit of a leap of faith involved, that I wasn't getting some things wrong - like that there was more moderation of conservative/Republican content than on the left, at least domestically - but pretty much any journalism involves betting on your interpretation of things. You're always gambling that one source or set of sources is more right than another. So for instance, the line that she had issues with, that Democrats had wider access to the content moderation machine inside Twitter, I had some pretty good sources on that in addition to the overall impression from looking at the material. Perhaps someday there will be a bigger release of the files, or internal data will come out, and that will be proved wrong. I don't think so, but it could happen. But there are always some uncertainties in reporting. On the other front, I guessed (in hindsight correctly) that the project was on a clock and that we had a finite amount of searches and went straight for the topic I thought was most explosive, i.e. the intel ties, out of fear we wouldn't get another shot at it. So, it's true that I didn't search for suppression of the left. But I wasn't really looking for suppression of the right, either. There were a lot of gray areas with this situation, but in the end it came down to, did we want to see this stuff or not? I did the best I could to get the most we could get.
You guys crushed it. I’m forever grateful. I personally thought it would reveal icky things about the folks at twitter. Instead they were more like patty hearst. In that space many turned into a purity test on Elon. I’ll never understand that. It diffused the reporting’s impact. Weirdly enough, republicans saw fit to have hearings. Will it ever produce consequences for anyone?
Yeah I almost wonder if it would have been better for everyone if Elon had pretended the files were stolen/hacked. His direct involvement didn't seem to help him or the journalists achieve their goals.
You did the right thing. Period. Not a fan of the “kids”. B. & R. They seem to be still drinking koolaid.
That interview was an uncoupling of Bri for me. She was making a fairly straight ahead evangelical argument :
The absence of evidence isn't the evidence of absence.
She might as well have been arguing for the entire Twitter files being a contrivance of the flying spaghetti monster.
You can't argue objectivism with collectivism, and you can't argue reality with true believers.
They are happier inside the delusion.
I agree wholeheartedly with Chuck on being grateful. The number of people I urged to check out your Twitter feed, who then learned some things they weren't seeing on CNNMSNBC, is large. And I'm sure they told someone, and after that it's that old shampoo commercial. thanks man.
Matt is being incredibly generous here.
I really like Bri and hated seeing you guys clash, even in the minor way.
I think her (and everyone's) frustration was that we wanted to see everything at once like the wikileaks of old.
The security state has always operated outside of the political realm. Left and right are meaningless. That's the main theme.
Glad to see you guys make peace.