Show notes
Are the online speech wars over? Just asking questions. Award-winning journalist Matt Taibbi joins Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe on Just Asking Questions today to help analyze Vice President J.D. Vance's blistering speech at the Munich Security Conference, where Vance called on Europe's leaders to stop suppressing speech, banning populist political parties, and annulling elections. Taibbi predicts Vance's speech will be "remembered as a moment of grave importance," as it signals the "collapse of the post–World War II order." They also discuss a nonconfrontational 60 Minutes segment about German speech laws, Tulsi Gabbard's confirmation as director of national intelligence, the crumbling legitimacy of legacy media, and why Taibbi is glad Kamala Harris lost the 2024 election. You can find Taibbi's work these days at racket.news and on the America This Week podcast with Walter Kirn. Sources Referenced: "Vice President J.D. Vance Delivers Remarks at the Munich Security Conference" (Full speech) Full 60 Minutes video on Germany's censorship "Bipartisan Coalition Finally Tells Europe, and the FBI, to Shove It," by Matt Taibbi Sen. Wyden questions Gabbard in confirmation hearing Original Romanian government document about the country's nullified election United States Department of State: Statement on Romania's Presidential Elections "British Man Convicted of Criminal Charges for Praying Silently Near Abortion Clinic," by Emma Camp "Trump Officials Attack a German Consensus on Nazis and Speech," by Jim Tankersley The Guardian: 'Vicious cycle': how far-right parties across Europe are cannibalising the centre right The Ron Wyden–Andy Biggs Letter to Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on backdoor encryption Just Asking Questions with Lee Fang Just Asking Questions with Mike Pesca Matt Taibbi adds more source links to this episode Chapters: 00:00 Coming up…00:25 Introducing Matt Taibbi00:54 Analyzing J.D. Vance's Munich speech24:17 The history of free speech in Europe32:09 Back to Vance: the end of the post–World War II American and European alliance?35:58 Fear of populism fuels censorship45:13 Is U.S. intelligence using the European Union to route around the First Amendment?50:32 Tulsi Gabbard as the new director of national intelligence53:53 Who did Matt Taibbi vote for?58:05 Reacting to 60 Minutes' praise of German censors01:16:40 Will the Democrats do any real post-election reflection? (No)01:19:48 What is a question that you think more people should be asking? Transcript This is an AI-generated transcript. All quotes should be checked against the audio for accuracy. Zach Weissmueller: Who's winning the online speech wars? Just asking questions. Matt Taibbi is here with us today. I'm sure most of you know him, either from his years of award-winning journalism at outlets like Rolling Stone or for his role publishing the Twitter Files. You can find his work these days at Racket News and on the America This Week podcast with Walter Kirn. Matt, thanks for coming on the show. Matt Taibbi: Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. Liz Wolfe: J.D. Vance delivered quite a speech this week at the Munich Security Conference. John, would you roll a clip from that? J.D. Vance: The threat that I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia. It's not China. It's not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within—the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States of America. Now, I was struck that a former European commissioner went on television recently and sounded delighted that the Romanian government had just annulled an entire election. He warned that if things don't go to plan, the very same thing could happen in Germany too. These cavalier statements are shocking to American ears. For years, we've been told that everything we fund and support is in the name of our shared democratic values. Everything from our Ukraine policy to digital censorship is billed as a defense of democracy. But when we see European courts canceling elections and senior officials threatening to cancel others, we ought to ask whether we're holding ourselves to an appropriately high standard. And I say "ourselves" because I fundamentally believe that we are all on the same team. We must do more than talk about democratic values. We must live them. Liz Wolfe: So you posted this speech in its entirety at Racket News, and you said that it would be remembered as a moment of grave importance. Why is this speech so significant to you? Matt Taibbi: Well, for a variety of reasons. But number one, I think Vance was essentially withdrawing, asking, or announcing that the United States was going to be withdrawing from a security framework with Europe. It was really not just directed at the Europeans but also at the intelligence services here in the United States. This is the subject that I've unfortunately been researching for the last three years—this gigantic web of digital censorship rules, speech enforcement, content moderation, mechanisms for surveillance, and overturning democratic results. There has been this growing bureaucracy, and we were watching with alarm, seeing that the United States was just a few steps away from being folded into these agreements. Vance coming to Europe and basically saying, "We're not going to be part of this anymore," is the beginning of the end of the post-World War II political consensus, where the United States and Europe have been essentially joined together in this imperial project. I think it's very significant. And it's also a big deal for Americans because the First Amendment did not have any defenders under the previous administration or in any of the previous administrations. Zach Weissmueller: In that first clip we just rolled, he mentions the Romanian election results. He describes how a candidate who was labeled as far-right surged at the last minute to win the first round, and then, right before the next round of voting, they annulled the election. The former president, who has now resigned because he was facing impeachment, released documents declassifying the rationale for annulling the election. I ran them through Google Translate, but we've got links to the original source in our description for people to look at. Matt Taibbi: Is your Romanian good or bad? Zach Weissmueller: Yeah, my Romanian is not up to par. But Mr. Google helped. What I've highlighted here is that the intelligence service argues that the candidate's rise in the opinion polls was determined by a coordinated campaign to increase popularity, which ensured his victory in the first round with 22.94% of the vote. They identified a TikTok network initially made up of 25,000 accounts. The activity of these accounts was organized outside of TikTok on Telegram, and there was one Telegram account issuing instructions. This account was apparently linked to the Russian government, though notably, the candidate himself was not directly linked. This is the classic "Russia election interference" scenario. What do you think about that pretense for annulling the results and the U.S. government's reaction? I'll pull up one more document here—sorry for the long wind-up. The State Department under Biden said at the time that it stood with the Romanian people as they faced an unprecedented situation. This statement came out after the court ruling annulling the election, saying: "Romanians must have confidence that their elections reflect the democratic will of the Romanian people and are free of foreign malign influence. The United States reaffirms our confidence in Romania's democratic institutions and processes." Liz Wolfe: And this is from December. It's worth noting that the first round was in November, and the election was annulled in December. That was all during the Biden administration. Zach Weissmueller: This statement came out on the day of the court decision upholding the annulment. This is what Vance was denouncing, saying we're no longer going to stand by and cheer as countries annul their elections. So what is your read of this situation, Matt? Matt Taibbi: Well, first of all, I'm highly suspicious of the idea that the election results were significantly affected by outside interference. I've spent a ton of time on different incidents in the United States where people tried to assert essentially the same thing. You might remember a Senate report from December 12, 2018, when the Senate Intelligence Committee commissioned a study on the influence of Russian bots on the 2016 election. There was a cascade of headlines about how 137 million people, or whatever, had seen a Russian ad or whatever it was. Now, the people who did that study were a company called New Knowledge, run by CEO Jonathan Morgan, a figure who appeared frequently in the Twitter Files. A few days after that story broke, it came out that the same Jonathan Morgan had been involved in a scheme to spoof the appearance of Russian bots in the Alabama Senate election. This may sound conspiratorial, but it's all reporting from sources like The Washington Post.* Essentially, New Knowledge created fake Russian accounts, had them follow Republican candidate Roy Moore, and then leaked to news organizations that Russians were following him. We know this because it was made public and because, in the Twitter Files, we saw communications where news organizations were reaching out to Twitter about these "Russian" bots. This is an incredibly easy thing to spoof. Also, all platforms have robust mechanisms for identifying and controlling the spread of automated disinformation. Even if they don't delete accounts, they can dial down foreign misinformation. So I'm very suspicious of this claim. And just think about it yourself—how many people do you know who would change their vote based on some internet ad? We all saw the images that were supposedly so influential… Zach Weissmueller: Buff Bernie Sanders Facebook images. Matt Taibbi: Right, exactly. If that's the point—that your democracy depends on not seeing that—then you've got problems already. Liz Wolfe: I want to push back on this briefly. One thing I'm curious about is, from a very basic level, wouldn't Russia have more of an incentive to engage in this type of interference in Romania in particular? Because Romania and Ukraine share a border, Romania has been involved in Ukrainian refugee efforts, and the idea of having someone more sympathetic to Russia in power would be strategically important. Romania is a critical player, much like Moldova. How does that factor into your assessment, if at all? Matt Taibbi: Of course, they have an interest in the Romanian election results—so do we. We spend a gazillion dollars on propaganda mechanisms. Most of them are overt, but Russia also spends money. As you mentioned, Moldova was part of the Soviet Union, so there is a longstanding tradition of Russia having cultural ties to the people of Romania and Moldova. They obviously want to influence the situation, and I'm sure they're doing it through both legal and illegal means—but so are we. Ultimately, democratic systems depend on the idea that adults can sift through information and make decisions on their own. We all see a ton of propaganda heading into every election. Washington, D.C., is the modern Rome—everyone wants to influence us. We're constantly bombarded with messages, not just from Russia and China, but from every conceivable country that wants to shape our policy. That's part of our decision-making process. The whole idea of democracy is that we trust people to make those decisions. Zach Weissmueller: Yeah, I think all of us on this show agree that the so-called Russian interference in the 2016 election was really a drop in the bucket. But let's take Romania seriously for a minute. Let's say we take this intelligence report at face value—there really were 25,000 TikTok accounts spreading propaganda in Romania, boosting this one candidate. What should a country like Romania do? What do you think they should do if a bigger country like Russia is polluting their online discourse with memes and bad takes? Matt Taibbi: Well, I mean, traditionally, what you're supposed to do is use the bully pulpit and tell people what the ban is. If it's really identifiably a Russian bot, usually the platforms will go ahead and zap those accounts. TikTok is obviously out of pocket, which is why it's so controversial. But again, I'm skeptical. This becomes the precedent for why we can't have foreign-owned platforms in any of these countries. How weak do we think voters are that they can't withstand 15,000 TikTok accounts? The other thing is, they were already thinking about disqualifying this candidate in the next round, which makes me very suspicious of the whole process. Where they absolutely should draw the line is if there's actual interference. Remember, the definition of electoral interference is changing votes, not ads. If there were a digital effort to mess with vote counts, then absolutely—you have to redo the election. But propaganda? That's just a fact of life. I think it's appropriate to educate people about what they might see online, but you can't have EU officials from Britain and France giving interviews saying, "We did that in Romania, and we'll do it in Germany too if we don't like the result." Think about how that sounds. That's a very hard line to take. I don't think you can use digital advertising as a reason to cancel an election—that's extreme. Liz Wolfe: I increasingly fear that the years from 2015 to 2020 royally screwed up our politics, or at least our conception of speech rights. Specifically, the idea that words are violence caught on, and that has completely polluted how people think about speech. I've also been thinking about this idea of "interference" being used in an imprecise way. What is violence, truly? Because words do not qualify. Electoral interference is a very serious allegation. But when we start extrapolating that term to something that doesn't historically qualify, it distorts the debate. It's a strange quirk of our politics. Where do you think this started? Am I correct in tracing this to 2015–2016, or was there a precursor I'm missing? Matt Taibbi: No, I think that's right. This became a big issue in the U.S. in 2016 with the election. You mentioned the confusion over the word "interference"—that's a really interesting and rarely remarked-upon feature of the Russiagate phenomenon. If you look at the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment, which claimed Russia influenced the election to denigrate Hillary Clinton and help Trump, they never used the word "interference." They used "influence operation." That's because, in intelligence circles, "interference" has a specific meaning—it means changing votes. Journalists were the ones who started calling it "interference." This pattern repeated itself. The 51 former intelligence officials who commented on the Hunter Biden laptop story said it had "all the earmarks of a classic Russian information operation." But Politico's headline said "disinfo." They never said "disinformation" because they couldn't—it wasn't disinformation. But the press did. The other issue is the concept of violence or harm. Americans are increasingly in favor of outlawing misinformation and leaning toward a harm standard for speech. We…
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