A Dirty One Night Stand

Strange Bedfellows in the Culture Wars

Last month, two journalists testified before Congress. Staunch leftists both—a former Marxist who took a leave of absence from high school to witness the Sandinista revolution, and performed environmental research in Latin America; and an investigative reporter famous for satirizing Donald Trump and exposing Wall Street fraud during the 2008 financial crisis. Both were pilloried by their own team, for three hours on C-SPAN. I can only imagine what that felt like.

A cocktail of anger and shame, probably, shaken with fear and loathing. Followed by the bewilderment of waking up to a dirty one night stand, naked on the floor of Congress.

Their bedfellows were dirtier than any brothel worker’s during the golden age of syphilis. The hearings, part of the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, were chaired by a treacherous, gutless old ward-heeler who should be put in a goddamn bottle and sent out with the Japanese current—to borrow a phrase.

Jim Jordan.

The Chairman from Ohio is not a focal point of sympathy. The man who allegedly turned a blind eye to sexual abuse as an Ohio State wrestling coach, and turned it again on 2020 efforts to overturn the election, as Trump’s treacherous ward-heeler.

And yet, under twisted circumstances in this upside-down world, Jordan came off as the voice of reason in this three-ring circus. Defending two “so-called journalists”— as the Democratic minority leader called the man who won the National Magazine Award and I.F. Skinner prize for journalism—against revealing their sources, and accusations of being Elon Musk’s “personal scribes.”

Of course, Jordan has ulterior motives for valor.

The Weaponization hearings—as Congressman Jamie Raskin said during opening remarks (wearing a blue bandana given him by Springsteen guitarist Steve Van Zandt, due to chemotherapy)—are probably part of a Republican attempt to run cover for Donald Trump’s election fraud. Inconveniently for Democrats, the hearings also reveal some election meddling of their own. The infamous Biden laptop, which the FBI coached Facebook and Twitter to dismiss as Russian hackery, is only the tip of the turd.

Republican treachery, and Democratic gutlessness during the hearings distract from the crux of the biscuit—why journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger agreed to testify, at the invitation of the Republican majority, before Congress last month.

They were there to discuss their Twitter Files reporting, revealing egregious State manipulation of social media. In a phenomenon that is becoming disturbingly commonplace, liberal journalists like these two have no forum to address pressing concerns on their own side of the aisle.

In this case, the concern was what one of the journalists, Michael Shellenberger, has called the “censorship-industrial complex”—a web of think tanks and government-adjacent organizations who work in tandem with national security agencies, to determine what can and can’t be seen or said online.

One of the more ludicrous, and overtly-State actions in this effort, was the establishment of a “Disinformation Governance Board,” led by this woman.

Nina Jankowicz, the self-styled Mary Poppins of misinformation, was swiftly retired, along with the DGB, after the public justifiably compared her organization to George Orwell’s “Ministry of Truth,” from Nineteen Eighty-Four. (There must’ve been something mildly dystopian about her explaining disinformation to the melody of “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.”)

In the wake of the DGB embarrassment, an alphabet soup of other acronymic organizations continue to wage this disinformation campaign under different names—the Global Engagement Center (GEC), Election Integrity Project (EIP), Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Virality Project, Hamilton 68, and New Knowledge, to name a few.

I stumbled across a new acronym entirely by accident, reporting on something as mundane as a campus speaking engagement in honor of Jann Wenner, the founder of Rolling Stone. One of the attendees in the crowd, a sponsor of the Berkeley speaker series, happened to be the founder of another disinformation think tank, the Institute for Security + Technology (IST).

The players in these organizations overlap, cite each other’s work, and float from institute to institute like bees drunk on the nectar of self-satisfaction. Presumably humming “A Spoonful of Sugar” as they go.

Woe and strange bedfellows to anyone who deigns to cover them.

Like Jeff Gerth, and more recently Bob Woodward, or Edward Snowden’s Wikileaks scribe Glenn Greenwald, like Bari Weiss of the Free Press, and others, Taibbi and Shellenberger have to take their forum where they can find it. On their own platforms, and—as far as mainstream media and government are concerned—often on the wrong side of the aisle.

Last week was the exception that proves the rule. Taibbi was granted a by-now rare appearance with former “friends,” as he called them, on MSNBC. Where he was railroaded by talking head Medhi Hasan, barely granted a word-in-edgewise, and candidly admitted to minor reporting errors on live television—something reporters at that network are loath to do themselves.

Hasan charged Taibbi with conflating two acronyms during his congressional testimony—CIS and CISA. Both are national security organizations tangled up with the Twitter Files. As another reporter notes, this makes Hasan’s charges that Taibbi rendered false testimony a ridiculous subterfuge.

Suffering fools like Hasad is part of the job, Taibbi wrote minutes before his NBC appearance, knowing he was probably walking into a buzzsaw: defending your reporting, admitting to mistakes, issuing corrections, and moving journalism forward, one discussion at a time— with whomever expresses interest, whatever their motives may be. This used to be boilerplate, Journalism 101.

The treatment Taibbi received at MSNBC was presaged by the hostility he was shown by Democrats in Congress. In what would have made, in forgotten times, for great montage fodder on the Daily Show with John Stewart, every minority leader in a long sequence of interruptors dismissed Taibbi and Shellenberger with extreme prejudice—“I’ll ask the questions here,” “This is my time,” “That’s not how this works,” “You don’t get to talk,” “Quiet,” and “No.” “Take off the tin-foil hat.”

As Sarah Hepola, another journalist disillusioned by her party’s recent disdain for journalism, commented on the hearings: I don’t know if I can throw my hat in with these people any longer. As Matt Taibbi wrote about his ordeal, “the Democrats have lost the plot.”

There was Rep. Sylvia Garcia of Texas, showing a fundamental lack of awareness for how Twitter, let alone Substack, works. “You yourself posted on your…I guess it’s sort of like a web page I don’t really understand what Substack is, but ah, that, all I can say is that…”

An aid had to whisper an explanation in Garcia’s ear, that Taibbi had not secretly provided hearings-related evidence to Elon Musk and congressional Republicans while hiding it from Democrats, when he “filed a report with Twitter” the morning of the hearings—better known as tweeting. She didn’t comprehend that Twitter is not a newspaper, and whatever information is shared online is immediately published for all to see. (Except when it’s censored or shadow-banned.)

Garcia also accused Taibbi and Shellenberger of being paid off by Republicans or foreign oligarchs to appear in Congress, and referred to their professional cooperation with reporter Bari Weiss (to the amusement of the peanut gallery), as “a threesome.”

There was Debbie Wasserman Schultz—a woman so obnoxiously power-hungry she was expelled from the Clinton campaign and scandalized by members of her own party (“We wish she would just go away,” one DNC staffer explained)—directing her aid to tote an enormous blow-up frame from Taibbi’s recent appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience, clumsily adjusting the poster behind the congresswoman for the cameras. The congresswoman insinuated that Taibbi was somehow making a living from his profession(!), profiting from the Twitter Files because his reporting was gaining podcast traction.

It was a ham-fisted effort to equate Taibbi with the hobgoblin of misinformation, Joe Rogan, which no doubt required one of her interns to screen three-hours of Taibbi’s interview with Rogan, so Schultz could pluck snippets from the podcast and misquote him.

There were a thousand other slights, not least of them referring to diligent reporters as “tin-foil hat” wearing “so-called journalists,” Republican stooges or Elon Musk’s lapdogs, while interrupting any attempt to respond to these smears. But the greatest insult to the free press was the minority’s failure to apprehend the direness of the situation, and what it means for freedom of information and State oversight going forward.

It’s not necessarily that Democratic minority members would have no qualms about the idea of State manipulation online; many of them simply have no idea. How could they, when some of them don’t know what Twitter is? Others are simply blinded by partisan furor—somewhat justifiably, given what’s happened to election integrity at the hands of certain Congressional Republicans, Jim Jordan in particular. But they overlook what is at stake.

Taibbi summarized his dawning recognition of what was happening at Twitter in the early days of his Twitter Files reporting, in a statement made this week. It may serve as crib notes for what the Democratic minority hasn’t realized:

A communications highway had been built linking the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence with Twitter, Facebook, Google, and a slew of other platforms. Among other things this looked more like a cartel than a competitive media landscape, and I had an uneasy feeling early on that publicizing this arrangement might create a host of unanticipated problems for everyone involved. Still, there was no question this was in the public interest. So we kept going.

Taibbi probably never dreamt that some of his unanticipated problems would include government intimidation and testifying before a Congressional circus.

The hearings felt like three hours of McCarthyite burlesque—with Elon Musk as Stalin, a confused Garcia standing in for drunken McCarthy, her humiliated aid whispering corrections in her ear like Roy Cohn, and Matt Taibbi as a bewildered Arthur Miller. Most obscene of all, Jim Jordan as Joseph N. Welch, pleading, “At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”

A farce of a farce.

While he was testifying in Congress, IRS agents visited Taibbi’s home, a threat that had little to do with tax filings. As the hearings began, the FTC was demanding Twitter release the names of all reporters involved in the Twitter Files. During the hearings, along with Rep. Garcia, a fuming minority leader Plaskett demanded Taibbi and Shellenberger reveal their sources on the Twitter Files. The chief source was obvious enough—but the minority wanted to hear the witnesses utter his name, to smear them with the taint of Elon Musk.

In professional journalism—not the kind where the FBI and Homeland Security feed stories to major networks to be commented-on by former intelligence officials, but the kind that involves hours of cold-calling and lede-chasing persistence—in actual investigative journalism, no source is untainted. Every source has ulterior motives for going to the press. Many sources are downright criminal, especially from the government’s perspective on whistle-blowers.

A loose canon like Elon Musk, willing to dump internal documents on reporters, is a once-in-a-lifetime window of opportunity that has just closed for Matt Taibbi. (You can read about Taibbi’s falling out with Musk over Substack, here.) Any journalist concerned with journalism over politics would jump at the chance to peer behind the curtain at Twitter, taking advantage of Musk’s erratic behavior. To harbor distaste for a journalist’s sources is one thing, but compelling them to name names in congress is another.

Congressional leaders should know this is a guaranteed tactic to make any journalist look heroic. Even someone who’s not a journalist, but plays one on TV. Even an imaginary reporter for Rolling Stone, played by John Travolta.

In a fantastically bad film, where Jann Wenner plays himself as the editor of Rolling Stone—in the movie Perfect—Travolta’s moment of glory comes when he explains to a judge that, as a reporter, he cannot reveal his sources without permanently damaging his credibility with future sources. Travolta’s character goes to prison to protect his source (a businessman under criminal investigation), regains the trust of love interest Jamie Lee Curtis, and comes off looking like H.L. Menken while reporting on “fitness clubs as the new singles bars” for Rolling Stone. Predictably, the judge comes across as a clueless authoritarian with blatant disregard for the First Amendment in journalism.

On March 9, Jim Jordan had to explain to minority leader Plaskett and Rep. Garcia that the Shield Act protects journalists from revealing their sources.

Media coverage of the Republicans’ breathlessly-named “Weaponization of the Federal Government” hearings has been predictable, anticipated by the MSM response to the Twitter Files, which labelled the exposé, in eerily uniform fashion, a “nothing burger.” Across Twitter, on behalf of copy-paste journalists from major networks and think tanks, there bloomed a thousand-thousand “nothing burger” tweets, as if someone had sent out a press memo no one bothered to tweak or verify.

Rolling Stone described the release of the Twitter Files in similar fashion, but managed to muster a synonym: “Elon Musk’s Big ‘Twitter Files’ Reveal Turns Into Snoozefest.”

The same reporter who penned this headline about the Twitter Files similarly dismissed the first round of Weaponization hearings, in a contender for the longest lede in the history of journalism:

“Inside Jim Jordan’s Disastrous Search for a ‘Deep State’ Whistleblower: Trump officials and GOP lawmakers are working together to deliver on Jordan’s promise to reveal an anti-Trump conspiracy. So far, they’ve produced a ‘dumpster fire’.”

Taibbi and Shellenberger knowingly dove headlong into that dumpster fire, to testify to a disconcerting phenomenon few on the left have the stomach for—State surveillance and clumsy censorship that amounts to propaganda.

The “dumpster fire” headline applied to the first round of Weaponization hearings, which involved not reporters but FBI whistleblowers—before Taibbi and Shellenberger agreed to testify. But the reaction remains the same in the wake of their second-round testimony. No one at Rolling Stone is leaping up to defend yesterday’s premier investigative reporter for the magazine, Matt Taibbi. Or even concede the obvious import of his discoveries.

The journalist who filed “snoozefest” and “dumpster fire” reports on the Twitter Files and House hearings for Rolling Stone, Adam Rawnsley, boasts an interesting resumé.

It’s not exactly a document of countercultural credibility.

Rawnsley is a Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, who according to the FPRI, “has written extensively about national security issues…on the intersection of technology and security.” His beat sounds a lot like the Institute for Security + Technology (IST), founded by the woman Jann Wenner was talking to after his soiree at Berkley, Chris Boskin.

Coincidentally, a “National Security Program fellow” at FPRI, Robert Murray, happens to be a former investment banker from Lehman Brothers—one of the Wall Street firms Matt Taibbi excoriated in 2009.

The FPRI is chaired by John F. Lehman, who owns a private equity firm focused "exclusively on investing in companies in the defense, aerospace and maritime industries” and “companies using the technical capabilities that originate from these sectors.”

“Technical capabilities” that presumably include monitoring information.

Lehman & Co. enjoys a familiar revolving door setup, a State-to-private-sector pipeline that relies on new recruits from the Defense Dept.—like Lehman himself, who was Secretary of the Navy. A lucrative business model, reminiscent of the stable of spooks who’ve found second careers at NBC and CNN, or the scores of government contractors who move easily from military to industrial job titles.

According to Lehman & Co., “To date, the firm has acquired approximately 60 operating entities within 24 platform investments with an aggregate transaction value of approximately $3.1 billion."

Security and Technology research at FPRI was founded by big business at Lehman & Co.

Lehman’s Foreign Policy Research Institute, where Rolling Stone reporter Adam Rawnsley is a fellow, shares the same sort of disinformation experts employed by Hamilton 68, GEC, CISA, IST and the gamut of other “non-governmental” counterparts to the Disinformation Governance Board that was briefly headed by disinfo czar Nina Jankowicz, aka Mary Poppins.

Clint Watts, the ex-FBI founder of Hamilton 68, is a distinguished fellow at the FPRI. Michael Horowitz—the Inspector General who oversaw the FBI’s operation “Crossfire Hurricane” and 2020 election interference investigations, and was also chair of the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee—is a senior fellow at the FPRI. (On an interesting side note, Horowitz’s wife is a former producer for CNN.)

Rolling Stone has come a long way since the days of Hunter Thompson or Matt Taibbi, to arrive at Adam Rawnsley. Relying on someone from the “disinformation-industrial complex” to cover House investigations into that same complex. A disinformation-industrial complex which appropriately translates to one acronym, at least, that is actually character-revealing: “DIC.”

If the idea of an Eisenhower-sized DIC sounds like a paranoid fever dream, look at some of the job titles above, and remember that most of the major players in this realm have moved from policing counterterrorism online to policing so-called disinformation, which in many cases has proven to be just “information”—lab leak theory, Biden laptop, rates of vaccine efficacy, etc. Many of them are policing it on the air, at CNN and NBC—Former CIA Directors John Brennan and Michael Hayden, and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

Beginning after 9/11, the security apparatus moved online to combat ISIS recruiters. Now the chickens, as they always will, have come home to roost.

There’s not a bureaucrat in Washington willing to terminate high-paying Homeland Security positions and congressional slush-funding over a hiccup like mission accomplished; when a department has completed its original purpose, such as countering ISIS, the mission merely changes.

This describes the military-industrial complex Eisenhower warned of in 1961, and it describes what is happening at the FPRI and other acronyms, at Lehman & Co, and in the media establishment. It now describes whatever is going on over at Rolling Stone.

To be fair, by the time Taibbi and Shellenberger agreed to testify before Trump’s ward-heeler and Clinton’s disgraced campaign chairman, Rolling Stone was already preoccupied with a different scandal.

It involved James Gordon Meek, an ABC News “national security producer,” who was also a former investigator for the U.S. House Homeland Security Committee. Rolling Stone had published a series of laudatory articles on Meek, who was arrested in a SWAT raid as he was being profiled for the magazine.

As NPR reported, “the Rolling Stone article’s first two paragraphs lionized Meek’s record and swashbuckling style,” as a national-security reporter. After Meek’s arrest, Rolling Stone warned that the raid on Meek’s home was “quite possibly, the first” raid carried out by the Biden administration on a journalist. The magazine fretted about their fellow journalist, “Meek appears to be on the wrong side of the national-security apparatus.”

Never mind that as a former Homeland Security investigator and “national security producer” for ABC, Meek was already inside the national-security apparatus. Never mind that there are hardworking journalists, including one who used to work for Rolling Stone, standing up to the national-security apparatus from the outside, and being harassed by members of the Biden administration from within.

Never mind that Meek was actually raided for possession of child pornography.

The RS journalist working on the story knew this; so did her Editor-in-Chief, a longtime national security reporter himself, sympathetic to Meek. While the reporter covering the Meek story was tending to her mother’s death, her editor made significant changes to the story, redacting any mention of the words “child pornography,” and editing Meek into security-state martyrdom.

In the form the piece was published, “the article left many readers with the distinct impression that the investigation was linked to Meek’s [national security] reporting—which could lead to a clash of the government and the press,” according to NPR. Rolling Stone’s official Twitter account promoted the story under the headline: “Exclusive: Emmy-winning ABC News producer James Gordon Meek had his home raided by the FBI. His colleagues haven’t seen him since.” The Freedom of the Press Foundation responded to the story with the statement: “If this was related to his work, as this @RollingStone report suggests it might be, it is a gross freedom of press violation.”

It would be nice if these Freedom of the Press concerns were applied to the journalists actually confronting the national-security apparatus, and not child pornographers.

To recap: Rolling Stone employs a reporter who “has written extensively about national security issues…on the intersection of technology and security” as a fellow at FPRI. That reporter downplayed the significance of Taibbi and Shellenberger’s congressional hearings, and the Twitter Files. His Editor-in-Chief has a long history of covering national security issues, and went out of his way to censor a story that made his friend James Gordon Meek, also a national security reporter, accurately look like a child pornography suspect. Worse, he edited the story to make his friend look like a victim of “the national security apparatus.” Meanwhile, there are more convincing martyrs—visited by the IRS, hassled by the FTC, and lambasted in Congress—subject to gross freedom of press violations, being ignored in the pages of Taibbi’s former magazine.

Wake up America honey, it’s time to face your Dirty One Night Stand.