Transcripts For CSPAN2 In Depth With Matt Taibbi 20170604

President trump, quote, he is no order con man. He is way above average in the american political system is his easiest mark ever. Guest yeah. This was that was early the campaign. I think that was in march of 2016. So it was just around the time when he was sewing up the republican nomination and the purpose of that article is this is a come. Com compilation of articles to explain the trump phenomenon for people who were having to take it serious come to grip watches the fact this was happening. So i took kind of a different approach to trump and tried to really listen to what his supporters were saying and try to focus on what he was doing, and my take on him is that he was a Brilliant Media manipulator and that he was perfectly suited to play on all the weaknesses of the american political media, ask that turned out to be truism was i had stucks to my guns on the piece. Thought he would be president and then later on i didnt believe that. Host well, the dave after the election you wrote i did not see donald trump coming. Everybody wrote that, though, didnt they . Guest well, they did, yeah. Yeah. I mean, its funny. I did see a long time ago that we were going to have a problem with this sort of postfactual media atmosphere, and that were for which trump was perfectly suited. I even wrote a book about its long time ago called the great derangement. Never saw donald trump specifically. He was a unique character and what was unique was his instant sight was that the American Insight was that american president ial election was just basically a big reality somehow show, but a bad rat show with bad characters and he made it engrossing and impossible to mitt reality show and was perfectly suited for the medium. Host along that line you write that Donald Trumps innovation was to recognize what chabad tv show the campaign was, any show that tries to make human stars of a human sedatives, like scott walker and lindsey graham, needed new producers and a new script. Guest exactly. We had for a lime time in the media been drifting away from substantive policy reporting and we had more and more played up the storytelling aspect, the production values aspect of it, the pageantry, debates that were covered like sports contests. We had pregame shows where people sort of prognosticate who i would win. Amazing graphics with the die surveys dial sue surveys showing what the person was doing depending on what they being saying. Trump said wouldnt it bit amazing if you had professional reality actor in the middle of this and took advantage of the stage craft, and thats what he did. A lot of the professional politicians, theyre good enough on camera and able to deliver a speech thats been composed by for them by their staff, but theyre not able to improvise and dot do what trump does and attract attention to the degree he is able to do. Host when wow covered this for Rolling Stone did you develop a respect for his Campaign Style or his ability to guest im not sure respect is an odd word. I definitely understood and appreciated what he was doing. I think i saw early on that trump was operating on a different level from the other candidates. Theres a scene i describe in the book where at Plymouth State University in new hampshire, and the press is always in the middle of the hall. Were roped up, behind a rope line and theres risers and the cameramen are standing there and trump had started to make us part of the act. What he would do is he in the middle of his speech he would interrupt him and say, loom as these jerks these vultures, never head my. Never traveled so far for an event. Didnt believe i would do this well and the crowd would physically turn towards us and sometimes boo and hiss and throw things and it was amazing. Trump was taking something that was incredibly boring, the american political stump speech, which is usually a very lifeless event with this very scripted, careful delivery, and he turned it into this immediate physical menacing wwe style performance, and it was very memorable for people. You could see they left the hall sort of worked up into a lather and that was very unusual for a political event. It was hard not to miss how effective that would be. Host how relate the start 0en election day you were at trump tower and somebody asked you if you were a cincinnati i think he i said yes. I had lot of experiences like that on the trail. And this to be fair had been happening for quite a lock time, before trump even came on the scene. Reporters had been more and more up popular over the years, and trump used our unpopularity in a really interesting way, because being a billionaire from new york, he theoretically had a huge accessibility problem with ordinary people in quoteunquote flyover country. He made a common enemy out of the media. And he presented us as the elitist, you know, upper class enemy, and he what he basically said is we both hate these people and that was his link to the common man, basically. So, that trick of using us, bringing abuse the speech and making us characterness the story, was incredibly effective for him women solved his accessibility problem. Host you called the american political system an easy mark. What do you people by senate. Guest well, again, the for example, the what trump did our political system, especially our system of political media, is set up in a way thats totally irrational and doesnt work well for the body politic. Were a commercial system of media, which means almost all the people covering the president ial election need to get rate examination subscriptions and eyeballs and hits to make money, and so anybody who does those things, gets ratings for the media has a massive advantage over anybody else. Opportunity matter your policies. If youre like donald trump and making money for the networks theyll cover you more. That was a major, major factor early in the race, i think. There was a statistic that trump got 23 times the amount of tv coverage Bernie Sanders did and that was because trump was making the tvs and the newspapers and magazines money, and that vulnerability that we had to somebody who was a good commercial vehicle, maded very easy for somebody like trump to come in and take over the entire spectacle. Host what is it like to travel in the president ial Campaign Reporting bubble . Guest its very difficult and frustrating assignment. The first time i did it for a long stretch was in 2004, and youre basically stuck in the same environment with the same people over and over and over again, for days and days and weeks on end. Especially the latest stages of the campaign when the secret service gets involved, youre literally trapped in this environment. You cant leave the rope line. You have to stay with the same people and talk to them and youre stuck with the candidate, the candidates aides and other reporters and theyre the only people you get information from. So what happens is n this environment i think this is big factoff with trump you just dont spend a lot of time talking to actual people and you mace lot of important phenomenon going on out there. Some we get our information from things like polls. That tells it what is going on and thats how we take the temperature of the people. But its not an accurate way of kind of discerning what is going on, and that kind of bubble can be very stifling and suffocating and strange. Its weird atmosphere to live in for a long time. Host reading your most recent couple of books, tell me if im wrong but can you draw a direct line from howard dean to ron paul to Dennis Kucinich to donald trump . Guest i think so, yeah. I mean, there were they were all protest candidates to begin with. The difference was that in the old days, the press had the power to kind of take these protest candidates candidates af marginalize them. If we thought the establishment media collect testify live decide collectively decide a person like Dennis Kucinich was not a fit for the presidency they would describe him as not really a candidate and it would be sundayle subtle sometimes, and not subtle other times they were describe as a fringe candidate in text, other times didnt cover the speeches and who would signal to audience who is the real candidate and not the real candidate. So we had the frontrunners and these are the curiosities. What happened this time around was that there was so much animosity toward the system and the establishment media and this whole kind of beltway complex kingmaking group that decided who gets to be president and who doesnt, that the voters poured all their energy into candidates like trump and Bernie Sanders, whose main selling point was i dont belong to that club. They stood up in front of audiences and said these people over here want to tell you who your president is going to be, and im defying that and vote for me. People flocked to those candidacies. So in the old days, yeah, i watched this as the press basically tore apart candidates like dean and kucinich and also ron paul, and they tried to do it to trump this time except he defied the instinct. We tried to get rid of him and he just wouldnt have it and he wouldnt exit the stage. Host do you feel that rowling stone and yourself are part ore the main stream media. Guest yes and no. We have been around for so long i guess were called legacy media. Were not corporate media. Thats an important distinction. We are privately owned. So, our coverage is a tradition. Now its been around for 50 years, and you wouldnt describe us as a threat bearer alternative media. Were somewhere in between. Host if somebody rent back and read hunter s. Thompson from 1972 could they relate to it today . Guest absolute limit Hunter Thompsons books are timeless, and they i think of them more as being like great works of fiction than i do journalism becomes irrelevant in a very short period of time. Its pretty hard to read journalism 50, 60 years later and really get into it. But Hunter Thompsons books are like great novels. The fear and loathing on the campaign trail issue always think of as i wrote this once for one of the introductions to one of the books it remind me of a book like the castle or the trial because its this incredible story of this guy kind of searching for meaning and justice in this horrible construction of fakeness and lies and treachery and with these awful villains populating the landscape, and he is never quite able to get there to find happiness and truth and validation. Those books are incredible to me. I think theyre theyll last for 100 years. Host lets go back to 2009 and your book the great derangement movement eye you write we were really losing faith in our political and National Institutions at that point. Guest yeah. This is something that i saw a long time ago and worried about a lot, that there was a trend on both the left and the right, and unfortunately in america we have to use these catch phrases like left and right because theres no other shorthand for owl politics. Its inaccurate sometimes but we have. To but people were increasingly, i think, tuning out the quoteunquote Mainstream Media and going and seeking out their own stranger, sometimes more conspiratorial sources. The internet is an incredible invention but is really good at matching people with their opinions. So, when people read the news those days, instead of just turning on abc, cbs, and nbc, like in the 70s, now they can kind of craft their own realities. They can say these are the five publications that describe the world in a way that i agree with, and they go on to the internet and read 0 those five things. What started to happen at the end of the 2000s was that people were beginning to retreat into their own camps and they increasingly didnt have common set of facts we were debating, and that i think was the precursor to this election. We just couldnt agree on what the facts were. Host is that a negative . Guest i think so. I think its a bad thing when the entire society cant even agree on the terms of an argument. Right . We dont really debate each other on issues or policies anymore. We disagree on the literal facts of the argument. And that its a very difficult place for us to be if we cant even agree on what happened, then it becomes very, very difficult for people to come to any kind of anything more substantive than that, and this has been going on for a while now and i think its a result of the fracturing of the media landscape, which is only getting more and more fractured as time guess on, i think. I think now you rarely see a News Organization that tries to reach the entire population. We go demographic hunting now is what we do. We say, here are our readers or viewers and were going to craft the news for that audience and theyre going to love us, and these people wont. Thats unfortunate. Host in fact in a recent Rolling Stone come almost, the title you wrote roger ailes was one of the worst americans ever. Guest yeah. I was trying to so roger ailes getting back to to Hunter Thompson i thought about famous obituary of nixon which an obituary can be a really interesting thing to write, and i always remembered what he said about nixon, that he was so crooked that he needed servants to help him unscrew his pants in the morning. But i was trying to do something similar for roger ailes, but roger ailes to me was a main driver of this phenomenon of, lets target a demographic, give them news they like and forget about the other people over there. And the talked about it. He said my audience is age 55 to dead. They dont even want to hear about working women or liberals. They just dont want them to exist and they crafted a news program for that audience ask that started down the road of died divided media landscape, we are a population split into camps and we each have our own news sources and we dont agree on anything and i think the was a pioneer in that. Host going back to what you called the 70s when we all listened to the same news, was good that nbc, abc, and cbs, essentially in many ways controlled what we heard and thought . Guest no. Look, it was an information monopoly. Read manufacturing consent when i was a young person and i totally agree with the premise of the book, which is that its very easy to control the opinions of the population if you only have a few media sources, and they were almost entirely simple the same, the permanent government of the United States and all that stuff was tremendously negative. Wasnt diverse. I grew up in the media. My far was in the media. It was a different news landscape. Would say in its favor was that they had a different attitude toured the purpose of the news. The original conception how the news was supposed to work was if you go bag to to Telecommunications Act of the 30s, the idea was that a government would lease the air waves to private companies and in exchange this private companies were supposed to provide a Public Service in the form of meaningful news. Were supposed to make their money doing entertainment or sports and then news was a loss leader, and it didnt have to be profitable, and they were only there to in their minds, to present something that was factual and useful to the public. And even though it was incredibly biased and led us into wars like vietnam, and excluded lots of voices, it still there was an urge there to try to get the story correct, that isnt necessarily true now. Now i think were basically crafting an entertainment product for people, and people consume the news the same way they consume entertainment. Host the deangel you described the book kicked off when americans finally figured out theyd been betrayed by their mainstream political system but still failed to abeen bon the old paradigm completely. Guest yeah. Well, one like we had a revolution. Right . I think there was a frustration with people. They didnt trust their politicians. Didnt trust the media, but didnt have an alternative theyve dust trusted either. There was incoherent anger in the population looking for an outlet and that left up ripe for donald trump. Enormous number of people who were discontent and looking for the kind of change, irrespective of what the change was. We saw these amazing polls that two out of three people favored a new direction and they didnt care what the direction was. And that hugely favored somebody like trump. He came in and his main argument to people was, whatever you think of me, im not what you have experienced before. And that was very attractive to people. Host because you were critical many times in your writing about donald trump, did people assume that you supported Hillary Clinton . Guest well, thats yeah. Thats unfortunately a consequence of how again, how americans consume the media now. Its assumed that if you write something negative about one party, you must support the other party and this is a condition sequence of the politicized media, that i think that people like roger ailes pioneered. If you are saying something negative about the clintons, therefore you must be a conservative, and that unfortunately is this kind of materialist view of what news is as opposed to just being sometimes people will have negative feelings about both candidates or theyre just trying to be objective and trying to call things as they are. Not necessary lay political act to cover somebody in positive or negative way. Host from insane clown president where did the name come from . Guest theres a band call insane clown possess see and i was trying to come up with something to hang around donald trump for a year, makes you not want to besot until your marketing ideas. That was it. Host who did the drawing on the front . Guest of insane clown president . . The illustrator for Rolling Stone. We have worked together for over a decade and has the same basically disturbed sense of humor i do. So we had a lot of fun during the campaign. Host from that book the clintons should have left politics the moment they decided the didnt care what the public thought about how they made their money. Guest i thought that was an amazing detail in some of the reporting that has come out. Among other things in books like shattered that described this moment where Hillary Clinton essentially said, when she was trying to decide whether or not to accept what ultimately turned into over 100 million in speaking fees, by taking this tour of all the various banks and big corporations, she said theyre going to write negative things about me whatever i do. Right . That whats substance of the quote. I cant remember exactly. But i think thats when youre in that place as a politician, and youre basically saying it doesnt matter what i do anymore, people are going hate me no matter what. What that means youre in my mind that means youre no long are really worrying about what the public thinks about you which is a dangerous play for a politician to be. Host good afternoon, and welcome to booktv on cspan2. This is our monthly in Depth Program where we invite one author on to talk about his or her body of work, and this month from our new york studio we have e Rolling Stone correspondent, matt tiabbi. His first book is in 2000, sex drugs and liable in the russian. And spanking the donkey in 2005. Smells like dead elephants, came out in 2007. The great derangement, ativing true story of war, politics and religion, 2009. Most recent books or grittopia, the story of bankers, politicians and the most audacious pour ground in history. The divide couple out no 20 14. American injustice in the age of the wealth gap, and finally this past year, insane clown purchases from the 2016 circus. This is your chance to call in and talk with mr. Tiabbi about his work, about politics. 2027488200 in the east and central time seasons. 7488 01 in the mountain and pacific time seasons. If you cant get through on the phone lines and want to make a comment we have social media ways to get through, including twitter, book tv is our twitter happen. And use that. Well be able to see and it maybe use it. Also make comment on on our facebook page. Go down and you can see a piece with mr. Tiabbi and just make a comment underneath there and well get the comments on the air was well. Finally, outcoming send an email to booktv cspan. Org. Well take the calls in just a few minutes. Mr. Tiabbi. How did you get into this business. Guest the Family Business, actually mitchell father almost everybody i knew growing up was a reporter. My father was a News Reporter starting from the age of 18, and that mike tiabbi. Guest yeah him worked here in new york in wcbs and wnbc. Just sort of retire now. Does a little work for pbs but was in the business for 50 years. My stepmother was an anchor at cnn for a while. Business anchor. Beverly shook. And a lot of my Family Friends growing um, they worked in places like the International Herald tribune and my childhood was like the movie anchorman. Spend my formative years in local affiliates and guys with bad facial hair. Never wanted to do this for a living but i wanted to be a novelist, but when it turned out my fiction was pretty bad, i sort of fell back into the Family Business and ive been here ever since. Host when did you know you were a writer . Guest i always wanted to be a writer. From the age of maybe 11 or 12, they can, that was never a question in my mind. I had a really deep love of books when i was growing up. I was an only child. We moved a lot. Becomes books were a tremendous solace to me. I was depressed a lot. And then when i started to learn how to write, i became really obsessed with the idea writing is almost like a religion. If you really get into it. You can never really complete the task of being perfect at it so you have to constantly try to practice Getting Better and better and better, and i became really addicted to it as a very young age. I wanted to be a comic novelist. My heroes were all funny writers, people like sak and i nikolai bogle, and author who wrote heart of a dog and master in margarita, catch22. Evelyn waugh. Thats what i wanted to do when i grew up, and i spent a lot of my early years, my teens, trying to do that kind of thing, and didnt work out. But journalism is has been great in a different way. I think its an amazing profession because it allows you to see the whole world, and meet this extraordinary range of people and its been great in a way that probably is more fulfilling than sitting at home and being a fiction writer would have been. Host you said you were depressed a lot. Why . Guest i dont know. Some people are just depressed. But host you think its organic. Guest probably is. Most people who have that problem would tell you that its just a chemical thing in your brain. Interestingly a lot of the people who were kind of my heroes also had the same problem. I remember reading about gogle who was a famous russian writer, and he was terrible depresssive, and he conquered it by sitting at home and trying to think of the funnest things he could all day long and wrote those things down and thats how he got through it. That was something i did a lot in my teen years. I tried to write funny stories and things like that. That was the way of kind of making sense of the world. Host on your bio, it says you were the Sports Editor for the moscow times. Hough how did that happen . Should i was living in russia. Studied in russia in 1990 and 91. So i was there when it was communist and i was there i went home they had a revolution, and then i came back, and i loved it over in russia so much one reason was that as a young, often depressed teenage and 20something, you know, america was a very difficult flies be glaus was enormous pressure in america to be successful and happy and on the television everybody has perfect teeth, and in russia everybody was depressed. People were nobody had nice clothes and i thought i fit right in here. This is perfect. So i when i went to study there i just didnt come home, and before long i ended up needing a job and so i started stringing for various newspapers and sooner or later i ended up meeting people in moscow. They had an expatriate newspaper there and since had a sports background they gave me the Sports Editors job. Host ahead howe did you play professional basketball in mongolia . Guest i had played basketball in college in the states from bard college in new york. Im an okay division 3 basketball player, basically, and i played a lot of street ball in moscow and was out at moscow State University one day, and i met this kid, we were playing a game of threeonthree and he said he was from the capitol of month mongolia and hd me they had a league there the mba. He said it was the only league the world with nba rules outside of america, and it sounded like so much fun. Went into work the next day and quit my job and packed my stuff and got on the transsiberian right field and when railroad and when i got i tried out and again got on a team. Was having a great time except i got quite and i will had to come home, but it was cool. That was like a sports star there, and people would recognize me on the streets and stuff. It was great. I was known as the the mongolian rodman. You have written about your drug use. Why is that personality for us to know. Guest i dont know if its important for nobody know. Didnt particularly feel a need to deny it. I had a period there in russia, we had a newspaper called the exile which was like a night life guide, and we were young and in a town that war very much like the wild west. Communism just collapsed. It was crazy at the time and we were doing a lot of crazy things, and i did have a pretty serious drug problem at one point, and i its not that i particularly want nobody know about it but i guess when somebody asks ill admit to it. Host you have been with Rolling Stone since 2005. Your book, grifftopia, came out in 201. In that book you write that allen greenspans rise to the top is one of the great scams of our time. Guest yeah. So, al green greenspan was a character i originally had planned on doing just a few thousand word little section on him because he was so important to the whole history of the modern Financial Services industry. His attitude he has this philosophy derived from ayn rand. An acolyte of hers, and he was fascinating to me as a character because he was very famous for being this great predictyear of economic events, but when i went back and looked turned out he had been wrong about almost everything he ever predicted, and so he was mostly, like a lot of famous hangerson, who hang around rock bands or other celebrities, famous for being somebody who was really good at telling politicians want they wanted to hear, and that gift of being like a president whisperer really is what allowed him to serve in the capacity that he did for so long. Wasnt that he was so great an economist. He really wasnt. More he was a very skilled politician and that is what i was trying to demonstrate the book. Host the divide came out in 2014. In the end, the one bank to get thrown on the dock was not a wall street firm but one housed in the opposite direction, the little to the north, tiny familyowned Community Bank in chinatown called an a back an cuss federal bank. Guest this is an amazing incredible story because this its a tiny familyowned chinese immigrant bank in chinatown, its stuck between two noodle shops, and it was the only bank in america to be indict after the financial crisis, and they were indicted because of a series of very small improprieties they themselves reported to the authorities. There was they were eventually prosecuted for defrauding fannie mae but fannie mae never suffered a sinkle cent of loss in the single cent of loss. So hear you have this tiny regional bask surrounded by behemoth financial instance institutions that settle for billions for committing crimes on massive scales but noun were criminally prosecuted and that was because we have this new doctrine in america which is too big to fail, and to too big to jail. We have said people like former attorney general eric holder, have said that they were reluctant to prosecutor Certain Companies because they were worried about the quoteunquote collateral consequences and what that might do to the larger economy. The convert if were afraid to prosecute a bank thaws of what might happen to the economy, that mean you have to be small enough to prosecute. That happened in the case of abacus. They found a bank that was small enough to prosecutor. So they indicted them but very recently they were all found not guilty, and so its an amazing story. Highly recommend everybody watch the movie. Host july 9, 2013, you were in the courtroom when cyrus vans junior was the prosecutor and these people were marched through in chains. Guest yeah. Some of them had already been arraigned and they brought them back a second time for a photo op. Not one of the major bankers, who got no trouble or accused of wrongdoing after 2008 none of them had to so much as appear in a courtroom. All of these big deals between the settlements between Companies Like jpmorganchase or Goldman Sachs all done in back rooms and just an exchange of money. Nobody had to sit the dock or being publicly humiliated but when you have this small immigrant bank, they needed a photo opportunity so they indicted a bunch 0 people and literally got enemy in a chain gang and dragged them into the courtroom and they excuse the excuse the prosecutor gates that wasnt up to us, that was up to the bailiffs and the court but it was clearly political. The purpose of telling that story was to show that the dichotomy and how we treat different kind odd people, when we talk about a group of people who dont have power, influence or connections, we treat them one way, and when they do have connections they near solve the inside of a courtroom. Host i sensed a feeling out outrage on your part. Guest of course. Think outrage is an important component of bag reporter. I think if you arent in touch with what is outrageous, then its very difficult to do this job. You have to maintain your sense of it throughout the years one thing that happens to people who are in the press for a long, long time, is you get outrage fatigue after a while. You have seen so much horrible stuff and some much bad behavior you stop responding to things in a way a normal person would. Thats something you have to guard against as you get older. This feeling of, ive seen that before. You have to continually say, this is not acceptable, and find ways to get upset about it. Host from the divide, we have a profound hatred of the back and the weak and the poor and a groveling terror before the rich and successful and were building a bureaucracy to match the findings. Guest yeah. What i was trying to say there was that the underlying political what drives the policies that lead to mass incarceration, to things like stop and frisk, community missing and stopping 500,000, 600,000 people a year, emptying pockets pockets and throwing anymore jail for nickel bag and dime bags on the one hand and then we take people like hsbc one of the worldest largest banks caught laundering 800 million for narcoterrorists in central and south america, and we dont even prosecutor those people. They just pay a fine and walk away. I think that what is underlying the policy divide there is that we feel like x group of people, we worship the people who make money. We have a reverence, admiration for people who are quoteunquote wealth creators, and the people we see at parasites and nuisances, we have no sympathy for them whatsoever. They month in jail. Ed a an eyeopening experience when i was writing the book. I asked a prosecutor in washington, how can you let these guys who laundered 800 million in drug money how can you let back and not good to jail, sending people to jail for possession on the other hand . These guys have to sit in jail. What he tied me was have you been to a prison . Those places are dangerous. And he didnt mean it in an ironic way. What he was trying to say, without really admitting it, was i just dont see that kind of offender as deserving jail. No matter what he or she does. But these offenders, well, they grew up in these bad neighborhoods and theyre used to that kind of thing so of course we send them to jail. That is what i was trying in get at, this psychological split we have where we just have this hidden hostility towards people who are poor and without means and we fear and revere these other people, and not to go on about this too much but i had an experience in russia that was that gave me insight into this. When i was a student in the soviet union, when i went to school in the morning, i would see these kids selling blue jeans and rabbit hats and that was commerce so that was against the law in communist russia, and everybody now and then the kids would disappear for three or four weeks do a little but the jail and come back. Meanwhile the people they were selling to, they would sell docks and tshirts and clothes to the Party Members who were the running the school, and nobody ever did anything to them. That was because it was so engrained in soviet society that the Party Members dont get in trouble but these people do get in trouble. I think that kind of unspoken split is where we are as a country, and its just hard to reconcile with. Host class split . Guest yes, i think its a class split. Goes beyond that, too. I think clearly race is a huge factor also. Think white audiences probably wouldnt want to admit it but they would look differently at a poor black person who gets busted with a bag of weed in his or her pocket than a white kid who is busted for the same thing. Say he is just going through a phase, is what they would say. Kid will be kids. But they would Say Something very different about a black kid who gets pulled over and has drugs found on them. So its race of class and all those thing jazz before we leave the dwight you you also visited california and went through the welfare system. What was that experience . Guest well, again, what i was trying to show is a lot of the big banks and Financial Companies id covered, a lot of them were technically guilty of things like fraud. If you want to prosecute these people it would be a fraud statute. So i looked at how they treated those people and then i wanted to see how they treated people who committed crimes like way fair welfare flawed. And i talked to people on welfare and they would tell me stories about how you have to fill out this gigantic sort of complex of forms just to get the aid in the first place, and then what they would do is check every single item that you entered, like on a monthly basis and had this whole network of computers, constantly searching you record and if theyre any inconsistency as all they jeopardy rate a fraud case and youll either be prosecuted for and it your benefits everyone away, they can interior home at any time. A Supreme Court case says they can do that. If once youre taking public aid. So i was just trying to show that, again, this dichotomy and how we treat people. You couldnt just go and seize the books of a company that has committed fraud like a Mortgage Prime mortgage fraud. They would treat them differently than somebody who committed welfare fraud and punish them much more severely for the will fair fraud than the 100 million fraud. So i was just trying to show how even getting that aid is a constant struggle to avoid being prosecuted for misusing the funds, whereas people who enjoy the large ss of the Federal Reserve backing window, their borrowing billions of dollars a month from these gigantic banks the government doesnt do anything. So, again, i was just trying show the differing attitudes towards the two classes of people. You hear from your Rolling Stone readers . Guest oh, yeah, absolutely. I hear from people on twitter, and i make it a point to read if anybody writes hate mail or a critical letter, if somebody take his time to actually sit down and write me a letter, i always read it. Think its important to read your hate mail. Not everybody does it. I dont block anybody on social media. I think often you need thats one of the ways to get better as a writer, you listen to your readers and sometimes they tell you, this thing you tried didnt work. It wasnt funny. It sucked. And you have to listen to that. Host matt tiabbi, is it easy is one susceptible to being brought into the group think when youre on the campaign and youre in this bubble, is there a group think susceptiblity . Guest absolutely. Its a social thing. Its a class thing. Again, just to talk about the differences between when i was a kid, and around the people who my father worked with, reporting was more like a trade than a profession back then. A lot of people who were in the press who didnt go to college. They were like this they got in sort of via the hersh method. Be copy boys at age 16 and just work their way through and it was a job more like being a plumber or a electrician hand being a doctor or lawyer. And the become then i think those back then those people didnt have any affinity for politicians. They had this stick it to the man attitude. Of course it was a far less Diverse Group of people on the one hand but in terms of class, they were very much more working class group of people back in the day. Now when youre on the Campaign Plane you see a lot of people who are like me. They come from privileged background, went to really could school, tend to be white and well off, and they get into this business often because theyre trached to the idea of being near power and powerful people. They want to hang out after the speech with the candidates aides or the candidate, his or herself, and you would never have seen that 30 or 40 years ago, this desire to be behind he rope line with he politician. Bank then the politician was the enemy. And what i was definitely seen lately is that socially the media and the people that are covering are the same people. After the campaigners are over they hang out with each other. The political strategists and the aides and the pollster goods to the same bars and the upper west side. I dont know thats a healthy thing. It may be, may not be, but certainly different from what it used to be. Host in your book,en sane clown president , youre very critical of the mannequin. What happened . Guest the Hillary Clinton mannequin video. Yeah. I think that might have been a little gratuitous. This is right after the election i wrote that and i remember looking at the mannequin challenge they called it. A bunch of people who were on the plane together and it was press and the clintons aides as and jon bon jovi was in the shot as well. And what happened again, when youre in that environment for a long time, it becomes romanticize. Were all on this adventure together, its cool wore hanging out and there are celebrities on the explain were all friends, and that congenial atmosphere you see is in books like primary colors whether its just this they kind after lionize whole idea of a roving campaign but they there is would this disaster looming outside the plane and they were completely unaware of it, of it happening. The probably all should have been panicking instead of playing that goofy game. Dont know. Ive had its not exclusive to the clintons. Ive seen that kind of thing in a couple of different campaigns. I was in a plane in the Obama Campaign once where i came in and i noticed all the reporters had photos had taken photos of themselves with barack obama and then post evidence it on the they would stick them on the side of the plane in the press session. Like barack obama, vetted for him but that was a bad look for us. Didnt want to be acting like groupies, even just superficially looked bad. And so i think thats what i was trying to get to with the mannequin challenge. Even if we do like the people we are hanging out with on the plane, we have to kind of pretend at least that were separate. Maintain that distance. Because its a bad look when we get caught making a mistake like we made in this race. We get entirely wrong from start to finish and thats bad for us. Host inunder your columns you have been critical of tom freedman, the New York Times columnist. Guest yeah. I actually kind of enjoyed ready tom friedman. What i have gotten after is his writing style. He is famous for mixing metaphors and some of them are so strange that its almost like a psychedelic experience trying to follow what he trying to say. Hell he had like he compared once the iraq war to driving a war with no Steering Wheel and sometimes you just have to throw the wheel out and but yaw cant drive a war with no Steering Wheel. He has a famous thing, the rule of holes. When youre in a hole thats too deep, you should stop when youre in three holes, stop digging. You cant be in three holes at once. All these bizarre images that are kind of mismatched in his writing and i really enjoyed writing and it i met him once and he was very gracious and i felt bad about saying negative things if just find his writing interesting. Host whats the origin of the name tiabbi. Guest its a sicilian name or arabic origin. Its im neither after those. My father is adopted. He is filipino and hawaiian and was adopted by a sicilian family in new york. Host matt tiabbi is the best. Correspond andent and author. His latest book, insane clown president. Hes the cover. Phone numbers host tyler in marietta, georgia, you have been very patient. Caller you talk about the media being complicit in the terrorist acts theyre provide nonstop storage of their attacks. Why does the media get this . I know they probably do but theyre going to generate more ratings. Mat. Guest thats an interesting question. I hadnt thought about it from that point of view. Clearly terrorism doesnt work if nosees it. So on the one hand theres probably some truth to that. On the other hand, it would be hugely irresponsible not to cover these things at the same time. So i dont know exactly what the main medium is there. Maybe theres a way to do it that is lessen situational. More people die in domestic murder than in terrorist attacks. Thats definitely a consideration but, yeah, clearly dish wouldnt necessarily say were complicit in it. I just think its probably a way to do it that wouldnt quite amplify the effect. People are so scared of terrorist theyve made some crazy political decisions as a result. Dating back to 9 11, and a lot of that has to do with the bombardment you against when theres a terror attack. Thats good point. Host do you find yourself when things like what happened in london do you find yourself turn thing tv immediately. I . I dont. Again, i lived in the moscow when terrorist attacks were routine, the chechens were routinely bombing the city. Just missed being in a subway bombing. Dust feint that its something i have to glue myself to the television to watch. Its a fact of life. I think its a very complicated political dilemma, but getting myself worked up about it is not i dont think is helpful. But clearly there is something to the idea that scaring people is a way to get them to tune into your network, and terrorists are scary, so there is a commercial motive there, and might be worth unpacking that a little bit. Host well, i cant find which book or article but you say the best story for cnn is somebody has fallen down the well and the best story for fox is somebody was pushed down the well bay radical muslim terrorist. Guest exactly. The point i was trying to make is that both the formula in the liberal media and the conservative media is the same formula. Wore both looking for the same sensationalist stories. Just that the fox version tends to be tilted in a direction if they can manage it. Their favorite story will tend to involve some kind of political nemesis, whether its a liberal professor or an islamic terrorist or god knows who else. Host next call from nancy in redondo beach, california. Hi, nancy. Caller hi good, morning, guys, and thank you to cspan. Matt, ive followed you for a very long time. Any question is that my sense is when a journalist or reporter is going to write a story or a book, most its kind of confirming what they already believe and may ignore what they dont want to see or contradicts what they initially believed, and i wonder, have you personally has there been a time when you thought a story was going to be one and way and turned out to be different and is it possible for reporters and journalist not be biased . Ill take my answer off the air and thank you again. Guest great question. To answer the last part first. I believe that all coverage is biased. Dont think you can have i think objectivity and the way they teach it in Journalism School is a myth. Every decision you make editorially speaks to your point of view on things. Just to take an example. If youre looking at the New York Times and theyre covering something and that kind of unemotional third person voice, and theyre trying to give equal weigh to different points of view, but even the choice of whether to put something on the front page or the middle, on the top of the page or the about. Whether to have a picture or not a picture to whether to make the headline fair or less threatening, all those things all editorial decisions and all speak too what youre opinion on the subject is. Middleclass white suburban who left the Republican Party traditionally to vote for donald trump then you look for people like that you ask those leading questions that confirms your thesis and then you publish it. That is not a good way to do business but in answering to a subject that is open ended that allows you the freedom to go in a different direction and i definitely have had the experience to cover a story thinking it would be one thing then having it turn out to be something completely different i had the experience of expecting somebody to be guilty when i started investigating and it turns out that they werent and i had to abandon the story of a lot of reporters and have that freedom but it is hard to allow them to go were the facts lead them. Host Brooklyn New York caller i have a question about health care specifically the members of congress what type of health care today have . What about their deductible and co pay . Today cover abortion and Birth Control . How old are their children on their health plan and how long do they keep them visit for life . That is a great question negative we dont know the answer to that. I do know that members of congress do enjoy the federal Health Insurance program at least they did for the last time i covered it yes we pay for their Health Insurance of course, that adds to the perversity of members of Congress Moving to take away Health Insurance for people. But that information is easy discoverable if you look for it. Host from california would is your experience in the former soviet union what is your current take on the political system if trump were a democratic president would he be tarred and feathered by the right . Also what similarities between russians and american characters. I have taken a little bit of heat for this to be a skeptic of the russian story my concern the right thing politically it is clear i am not a big fan of donald trump i would not shed a tear if he were in peach but my concern about the russia story it has been sloppily reported and in a way that for people it is excessive with no news out what touched that is set in motion a chain of events but i think was very unfortunate because as reporters as a rule we dont publish crimes against people that we cannot verify because we dont want that to happen to us. So when we did this with trump with his explosive set of allegations that we could not verify it, and now it is all over the internet and we have millions and millions of people who believe implicitly this is true. And audiences coming to this with this set of expectations when we dont know what will happen i spent months on this since this is an example if you cannot find what the truth is but every time i actually tried to get over something concrete on this story just to come of with a dead end and Anonymous Sources who would not come up with verifiable concrete information. I think it could be a disaster if this turns out not to be true and i am worried were in over our heads. And one of the things that i worry about is when people are emotionally enough about stories that they attack somebody, the new term for people that do not believe the russians think they call them antiantitrumpers they are accused of aiding and abetting donald trump among others but what happens when they see that happening even though i dont worry other people liked and they would think twice and say i am not sure about this. And that is not positive. People are afraid to speak their mind people know it is easy to follow on twitter but they know the opposite will happen and that is not a positive situation you dont want people to be afraid to say what they see. And the media in particular saw this starting to happen before the rush of thing even took place. There was a shift that trombone is such an extreme character that we in the media have to rethink our objective posture and start to become advocates and think of ourselves as a force to stop him. So what is dangerous about that attitude is a vendor cuts our power. Entirely from the independence if we are free to be part of the Democratic Party that a oneparty over another it is just about one thing, of the truth and we are useless and you have to be separate. That is like in order to help the rock above push through the nominees they got rid of their ability to filibuster the of president ial nominees because they wanted to end the gridlock in washington and that seemed like a great idea at the time to help people get through but then look what happened three years later now the senate is to weaken the Minority Party in they undercut itself with that but Institutional Authority and the media is doing that now. To make that indistinguishable. So we have to be seen as separate. Host another part of the question was differences or similarities . There are differences and similarities with citizens view themselves and to derive incredible pride from people who live in small countries so i remember being in the apartment on the day they dismantled the soviet map they changed the name from the ussr so basically the old soviet map became much smaller. So he looked at the new map and was fined and with that experience of the superpower in now to be part of the empire and was now not any more. So with that world hierarchy both countries are heavily militarized and in terms of differences or to be much more conservative . I have to think about that. Host wall you think about that matt taibbi go ahead with your question or comment caller. Caller first of all, i think youre absolutely right the media is a mouthpiece for the Democratic Party. That is another thing that would assure opinion of the writings of those of the book heretic that we cannot kill them all but we just need to report the notion of the islamic world having a reformation similar to what the Christian Church did to get out of the seventh century. Nobody is talking about the idea of reformation. Host are you familiar with that of their . Guest i have not read her book but i have spent a lot of time and though least i dont agree with the idea that i think we exacerbate the problem when we do that and it is an issue that i agree hasted come from a transformation and has something to do with changing our attitudes toward society we wouldnt have those problems about a truce of colonial presence. Or not have an interest in their oil wells it is definitely a complicated issue but dropping bombs is not the way to go. Host comment on the phenomenon of buyers remorse. Guest i have not seen lots of data that i have seen tromps Approval Rating is around 39 per cent which is ecorse if a little bit lower than where he was it in november but the democrats have also seen a significant drop in their Approval Rating they were 45 now theyre at 40 so i think people who voted for donald trump if they were not turned off before november they will not be so it would take something extraordinary like proof of him conspiring or a sexual scandal to really get people to move off their support. So how many people are Minnesota Vikings fans . It is a fanatical relationship and it is hard to break the bond. Host here in new york city right for Rolling Stone what is the general attitude of the people in the city . Guest towards donald trump . Almost everybody i know is horrified by donald trump. The dichotomy is not that hard to figure out if you look at a map everybody who lives there seas of read with little dots of blue. And receive the world entirely differently. And that contributes that we did nazi that coming to live in new york gets lost in the listed washington and they watch movies with subtitles in the heat of ethnic food and they dont watch nascar so what will be tough for those americans to have any type of exchange for each other. Host were some Trump Supporters have shocked you . There are a couple of people that i know who did not vote this time and that was a little bit shocking and that spoke to some perpetration but no i dont know anybody like that do you . [laughter] host the next the mail from tucson arizona what about the Goldman Sachs purchase of certificates you referred to the venezuelan president but i wish shot to you as a progressive journalist would use the word dictator for the same characterization with those elements of the u. S. Government have used. I have heard some push back from that on some people i am relying on people who cover south american politics and my understanding of that situation is is essentially he cancel and has been acting in the undemocratic way but i did mitt there is room for me to learn on that issue i have to go back to look. Host scottsdale arizona. Caller hello. I have two questions. How did we get from a candidate like gary hart to donald trump and that seems like a huge leap to me so what is your take on president obama . I also voted for him but a number of problems we are facing and he did not deal with them the racial divide and ronald he was afraid but i like him as a human being but if he really did anything. Guest i wrote that piece right after the election and i had been critical of barack obama with the subject i have covered over the presidency and that he doesnt have a great record their that was mainly known not winning a single conviction for any of that corruption so i was critical of barack obama i did not like the fact that he ran as the economic progressive and when he got elected he had a Transition Team and people like Timothy Geithner and eric holder and with the assistant attorney general at that time so all the banks were their clients and that came through in their enforcement decisions. So i was always critical level, but it think history will look back in a very favorable way because as a progressive person he was disappointed in a lot of various with that continuation of Guantanamo Bay but his demeanor and composure and unwillingness to anchor and not give up on the full segments by way of criticizing Hillary Clinton that even in places i knew i would lose i would continue to reach people in rural iowa instead of losing by 50 points and lost by 20 and obama was saying so basically we cannot give up on being one the whole country. He would still try, a matter how bad it was directed toward him. That they never took the bait to make a divisive and now with somebody like donald trump as president were everything is a twitter war within 10 seconds to impact the National Character Going Forward for a whole generation so i really do wiedmaier barack obama and that was nearly impossible situation. Host lone pine, california. Caller hello. I have a comment i have been watching this all is that love will love viciousness and it became so locked in. But i just want to say thanks for helping me like a day after day or year after year with reporters spouting stuff but the question that i want to ask is why do we need Health Insurance companies . Because luckily i have had a medicare but as a child we just went to the doctor. And there was no issue of insurance. Why we need them to take trillions of dollars . It has been awhile since i covered that subject looking at the comparison of the cost because Health Coverage by far we have most Expensive Health care in the world compared to other industrialized nations that majority of the money that we spend that other countries dont go to a couple of areas like paperwork and profit the biggest area of waste of the Health Care System like having a single payer Health Care System uniformity of billing and paperwork and collections and subsequently shut down where half of the Administration Staff was chasing collections and they had to do so much work just to get to the point with a try to collect from those businesses so eventually they went out of business that system makes no sense to me and the profit in this area i understand companies have to make money but when half of that money is made for profit that does not make sense so clearly the american system is the most irrational and logical in the world. One of the things i enjoyed about russia i could walk into the Doctors Office with my was sick. They didnt have the best equipment or medicine but they would see me. Is something that this generation that health care is something that you have right to a and that is too bad. But in terms of a broader sales roger ailes because other remembers have also told me that they became increasingly angry and bitter with other family members and dont talk to friends and relatives anymore so the way we consume media now and donald trump is applying your is the pioneer for this but i cannot remember that smattering what political opinions were and now that means everything and it is really strange. Host did Rolling Stone a sign you the financial beat . Guest i believe what happened was after the president ial election of 2008, it was my editor at the time we did one story it was about aig and i did not know anything so i had to learn what the collateralized debt obligation was or all these things and that took me a long time but we did it and got such a huge response because up until that point was explicitly written by people written in the finance sector purpose is the Financial Reporting for ordinary people so to translate for regular people how wall street works is a new thing and had never been done before. We just kept doing it and it turned into eight years of work and that was really cool. He was great during that entire time theyre not many editors to allow reporters to do in 8,000 word feature on some of prime mortgage fraud or house foreclosure and how that works these are very difficult topics. They dont sound sexy it is hard to get advertising dollars but he let me explore them for a long time and it was great. That is all you can ask for in an editor that they support you that way. Host your most recent book insane clown president. With another hour and a half in the program. Michigan your on the air. Caller i have been reading your articles in Rolling Stone there seems some similarities with your reporting and thomsons coverage of the nixon campaign. Was the influence of yours or who your other influences might be . Guest actually Hunter Thompson was an influence of mind every reporter in the country, his books actually one of the high points of my career was that i could write the introduction that was a huge honor so i remember when i was 15 years old taking a road trip from new york to key west all we did was read out loud of Hunter Thompson. So this weird for dimensional and he had his own language. He invented his own strange language and i was fascinated by him. And i try not to copy him but it is hard not to to cover the same stuff so it is hard not to fall into those patterns. But with other reporters i grew up reading h. L. Mencken and also Terry Southern and a lot of russians over the years to i thought were great writers. There are other writers who are read that were not a journalist but those are the big ones. I talked to him on the phone once. I was assigned, a Publishing Company asked me to do a compilation a book about gonzo journalism and gonzo reporting and at the time i needed the money source started to do it so i chose a bunch of particles that i thought that but that tradition but then they came up against the problem but all that meant was like Hunter Thompson so i thought i cannot do this project without his consent and i needed to know what he thought about it. He said that is a crappy project. He said how bad you need the money . I said pretty badly he said i cannot be a part of it but good luck to you. So he gilted be out of doing it. I did not do it but he was cool. But what if people knew him very well. He was nice to me. Host this email, i found insane clown president at the library next to amusing ourselves to death which i was going to pick up reading them together is quite interesting have you ever read that was that influential to you . The second part is where you current what you currently reading any recommendations for the summer . Host one of the things that we do is we ask our guest and the books that have been influenced and here are the responses that matt taibbi gave. When i got here wanted to spend my time getting to know people so i interviewed a majority of people in private to get to know them and i am one of the three or four most conservative that i am not very partisan purpose was indifferent so what are they worried about . Why are we not tackling the challenges of warfare inside the next decade . What about portability of benefits . Benefits . , and isai spend time in private i realize there are some very substantial collective action problems i would summarize to say as we move into the post industrial moment institutions are hollowed out most americans are not polarized the disengaged and worried about enabling us there is a lot of loneliness because people are not consuming Cable Television news talk shows so there is polarization happening but most of the public checks out all together. One of the effects of polarization they think the main way to lose their job the biggest longterm thought is there incumbency. Most people are more afraid to lose a primary than try to persuade the other party but then to fraction media because of the digital revolution it is possible to speak to know me hear from the of the chamber but that is a smart strategy if the goal is reelection so we need to do right by the next generation. Host matt taibbi you list a couple of books on your favorites. Who is under last . Guest a very funny british writer, as satirist the most they rush from scene to scene and like a lot of british writers he has incredibly witty dialogue like oscar wilde, but green is another one of my favorite writers but his books are just so beautifully structured and economical and every line is tight and the there is no emotion so they make you think that is a book every Foreign Correspondent carries on his or her personal over the world with a story about a guy who has a gardening column in a british newspaper and by accident is dispatched to cover a civil war. And like all comedy is a misunderstanding and the editor mistakenly thinks it is a gardening columnist. It is hilariously funny and he is like a great model for satire in general for the panoramic view for the entire absurdity of the Human Experience on top of the craftsmanship to be incredibly polished. So that checks all of boxes. Host have you read ana corrinina in russian . Yes. I have. One of the great things about tolstoy it does sound pretentious but but his writing even in english translation comes through that he has an incredible rare gift for the powerful simple sentence to find this simple way to communicate the most complicated thought like a pulsating force that picks up speed over time so my russian is good but not fantastic uses simple words and a simple structure is gorgeous because those who have the opposite quality because they were a big fee and of these huge sprawling sentences and paragraphs that are crammed with subordinate clauses that our difficult to follow so there are two different ways to achieve the same thing but tolstoy a simplicity is amazing and beautiful. Host you are a fan of footnotes in your work. Guest yes. I was weighed more of the fame and of the method to have huge run on sentences insubordination and parentheses and it was cool to force the reader to do a little bit of work to get to the point or the punch line with those footnotes appear to take various journeys on the way. I used to do that much more now i try to go to the of their way to make a simple declarative sentence with fewer adverse insubordinate clauses. Host on your list can we disagree more constructively . Guest that author is a professor i believe here in new york city and to address because i have been really depressed by the state of american politics lately so i think the partisan nature of it has become so angry and and redeeming the opposite of uplifting. When i mediate a political book usually feel better or at least clearer about life and now is a bunch of people denouncing other people. Is there another way that is happier out there . Of book called utopia for the realist it is solid cry out to another approach to politics why can we have biggity is anymore . So reading john mccain does not mean i agree with him but im just looking with a view blue vs read i am just so tired of that character. Host our guest on booktv matt taibbi. Here is how you can contact us. Throat the show we will put up the social reality at address matt taibbi is the author of seven books the first one came out in 2000 called the exile. Spanking the bulky pokey. Smells like dead elephants had 2007, the great derangement 2009. Giftopia 2011. And american injustice 2014 and insane clown president just came out of this year something that you wrote in the great derangement could you explain. I have a confession to make it is the easy to explain but here it goes for after two days of nearly constantly listening to instructions song in worship and praise to days that meant the unending regime forced to take those responses a funny thing started to happen. Guest i was under cover i guess i was trying to do a spin, instead of reversing myself with the church down in texas it is where they believe the end of the world is coming the pastor is famous waiting for the rapture of a big supporter john mccain and i was interested in that mind set so i had to craft a persona and going to the church i came up with an alternative identity i went away on retreats and learned all the prayers and and i think that is the section where i talk about i started to like it after a while. So that was a key insight which was there is a soothing quality to all of their rituals at first thought it was the worst music ever heard but after four or five weeks i started to sing along and get into it. I thought i have to get out of your before something happens to be permanently. But i was trying to explain how people can fall for something that on the outside is ridiculous but they take people who are vulnerable going to difficult times in their lives some were simplistic but they tried to understand that. Host california good morning. Caller i have been a long time follower and also of matt taibbi. Regarding the last thing he addressed about enjoying the church, a social psychologist speaks to that and of course, marketers know very well how the brain works. I am 80 years old and a volunteer in the San Diego Community independent commercial station. I wonder if matt has a suggestion of a radio across the United States to provide an alternative foists in san diego to what were hearing on the news constantly . And he said that we should be seen as the truth in reporting news and i am wondering as you go when youre speaking to worse talking about the Trump Administration someone when we see a personal view of somebody that reports for those who read what that newsperson rights, can we see the truth . Guest that is a good question. The question of how do you get at the truth, so for Community Radio to reassert that part first i have never worked in radio before but i do think that local media is making a little bit of a comeback some of that is through internet media based like a podcast and that is one thing that is great huckabee easy and relatively low cost like a 12th part series of local issues if you have a local scandal or a crime or a trial and it is interesting to your listeners because of it is in their neighborhood you can use storytelling techniques or make characters out of people that is what is cool of the media as much as we have been critical of the fracturing we have these new innovations with a new and interesting ways so i were in Community Radio i would be excited about what i could do. Is essentially you could make a reality show even a Little League team or anything. These are the things we would not have sought to do 40 years ago and to be on the radio with the podcast or the talk show, now you can do a sophisticated storytelling or cool things on the radio. Tried to be as creative as possible with at and take advantage that you are a local that is the way to compete with national media. You know the characters better than them so that is the advantage that you have. In terms of trying to be truthful, that is a huge metaphysical question but the best way to arrive at an understanding is to consume as many different sources as possible so i was trying to learn about wall street i did not know anything going into it so to ask them the same question of the cbo and how does that work . Are what is a synthetic cbo or what happens with a crisp bankruptcy . They start to pick the Common Threads of what was similar it was a process trying to figure out you know, he will not ever get that hold unvarnished truth but that is what we do as human beings to put that together and read as much as possible. Host have you gotten into podcast . Guest i a sometimes listen i might be starting a project i am thinking about that. It is beneath way to communicate with your audience and allows you to do some of different stuff with the work that i do it is pretty tough to do comedy or book reviews to go in a different direction and there is a lot of interesting work going on with that. Host in new york you are on booktv with matt taibbi. Caller good afternoon. Matt, i have a question i could touch about on every single thing that has been part of the discussion this morning but for the first 25 years of my life along with your dad. I grew up bomb that i grew up on that i think i spotted you a few times when you were around seven or eight. [laughter] you were definitely your fathers son. So this last caller from the nonprofit radio still kicking tail at 80 years old you were discussing the utility of a trial and that is the Corporate Fund so to go after those individual benefit recipients but not the Larger Companies that are reaping these massive quantities. Are you familiar with the case in new york now in the tenth year that has created new what it is involving criminal Justice System and drug testing are you familiar at all . Guest no. I am not familiar with it but i am interested in it. Host he is not with us anymore you will have to do your own research i apologize. I do want to say the question from giftopia that it is much easier to slamdunk a conviction than not to take a complex case over the last 10 or 20 years . So look at it from our point of view of we get evaluated according to how many convictions we get so if you are us if they have the best lawyers in the world it is not easy or take 50 drug dealers and get a win on all of them . Or the others we put them in the box and scare them and confess. So these giant Financial Institutions they of the best leaders in the world even when they are plainly guilty it is extremely difficult. I covered the trial that it took so long with the enforcement because they are trying to get within the statute of limitations. Talk about rigging in the Municipal Bond market they had them on tape clearly they had them. You know we are giving up. We are just going to take the money from these guys because its too hard to take them to trial so we will take the check and we will put these people in jail. Which invalidates gel as far as i am concerned. It is a certain class of people, if they cannot go to jail and only a certain class of people can then it is not legitimate criminal justice to me. I think you have to try anyway. Host the next call is rob from milford connecticut. Caller matt, the conservative called in today im quite sure. I hope i can get my comments and question out. We have some disagreeable voices. You talked earlier about not liking the words liberal and conservative they are shorthand. But you went to an extremely liberal college. You worked for a man who is an extremely liberal man for you corded several people and roger l fox news, use the words conservative but you have not used the word liberal. I understand we say i agree theres no such thing as objectivity. My comment is i think that you are my question has to do with race. Over the past 50 years by every single metric, all negative Human Behavior is disproportionally occupied by black and latino people. I contend that black and latino men roughly between the ages of 15 and 40 445 have been our greatest domestic liability. Since 1965, please answer this question. I cannot get one liberal anywhere here at yale to answer this. Is there any country where spanish is spoken of in africa whose standard of living is comparable or greater than ours . Host matt taibbi that was rob in milford connecticut. Guest i do not even know where to begin with that question. It is preposterous. What youre saying is that you think that inherently, racially, black and hispanic people are more prone to negative behavior than white people . I mean that is what you are saying. With that question. It is absurd. It is preposterous and i think you should be ashamed of yourself. If you want to come after me and say im a liberal and uppermiddleclass white kid that went to college and you do not see anything between me and fox news that is fine. Even though i clearly regularly go out to the Democratic Party in my work and i have never heard once fox news take on a conservative on that station. I tried to look at everybody. And i disagree with people you know of my own political character all the time. Because i think it is healthy. It is not a business for me. I do not do this to try and scare liberals into tuning into my articles so i can make money. This is about trying to call things as i see them. That is not what fox news does. I think that your views, could not disagree with them more strongly. I feel sorry that you feel that way. Host this is carolyn in spearfish south dakota. Matt, how much blame should belong to the Washington Post and New York Times for transferring donald trump that the voters with the other way in response to. I do not know about singling out those two publications. But i do think that it was a phenomenon that was true. When we you know i talked about this in my book, when the report is when after trump, he rose in the polls. He did not go down. Everything the time he had one of those scandals like for instance after when he said i like people who arent characters like john mccain. I mean it was an unsurvivable scandal. Right . Have you to say things about mexicans in america but veterans . Come on. No politician has ever survived Something Like that. Not only did he not go down in the polls when he was excoriated in the media. He rose and when he was confronted he denied that he ever said it and the media went after him more and he went up higher in the polls. I think what we learned in that experience we should have learned is that a huge section of the public dislikes us more than they dislike donald trump. And they distrust us more than they do someone like donald trump. This is why have a little trouble with people that say the media did not call trump out enough. We certainly did, it is just that we do not have influence over a segment of the population anymore. And you know i think we have to examine why that is. Why are we not listened to my people out there . I think some of it is a class thing. Some of it is that we are not interested in the same things that trump voters are interested in but whatever it is we need to address this. The 2009 book the great derangement, matt taibbi rice washington politicians basically viewed the people as a capricious and dangerous enemy. A dumb mob is only interesting quality happens to be in their power to take away politicians jobs. Guest yes. This is something i hear over and over again from people who work in congress. I heard lots of stories from people who talked about how the worst job in the Senate Office Warehouse Office is the person who has to answer the constituent telephone calls. I hear stories about people who sit there and when the phone rings they just hold it like this. Politicians look at the voter has a kind of nuisance who you know im talking generally. There obviously discussions but for the most part politics can be conducted without a whole lot of interaction with the voters. Basically you can construct a policy that your donors support. You get money from your donors in exchange for creating legislation that they like. That you do commercials for you for the commercials on air preview appearances in the media and you run elections that way. When most of them are not seriously opposed anyway. If you play your cards right you basically do not have to leave washington in order to get reelected. You have to go home symbolically and make some appearances but the way the game is played out so that raising money and doing commercials and doing legacy media appearances. You can do all of that without really talking to people. I think that is a big problem with politics. And donald trump basic strategy and talking to people, physically interacting with people and only small towns. Host this is joe, this is an email new york city. Donald trump wants to repeal the ferguson act of 1944 allowing Insurance Companies to cross state lines. He wrote that. Guest i did. I was really interested to hear. I remember hearing him talk about that for the first time in new hampshire. He said it in a very strange way. He kind of talked about Insurance Companies and how they you know the lines it didnt quite make sense at first but then i realize he was talking of the antitrust exemption. But i have not seen any evidence that he wants to repeal it enjoyed by Health Insurance companies. So it could turn out to be one of these things that you know donald trump talks about a lot of things that he wanted to do. On the campaign trouble we are not seeing any of it. You know he wanted to the tax rate for people in private equity. Well, where is that proposal now . You know we will see. It was interesting hearing him talk about it. And it was many populist things that he said is a candidate that seemed to work with people. And but again, as president , is he going to carry through . We will see. I dont know. I wrote about this the other day. I mean a similar example was he was in favor of importing drugs from canada. But we have not seen any evidence that he is really pushing for that either. Host the same with barack obama. Guest exactly. Again, this is a problem with american politics which is that campaigns do not have a whole lot of connection to reality. There just shows. And people tend to be much more progressive or populace in their as candidates than they are once they get elected. Host what would be the upside or the downside of changing ferguson . Guest it would increase competition between certain Insurance Companies. Right now they do not have to compete with each other. It is because of these antitrust exemptions that they enjoy, they basically host and h state. Guest exactly. It was something that they got early on. I guess it was in the early 50s that they got this exemption and they have had it ever since. It is one of the main reasons why Health Insurance prices are so high. And the cost of healthcare is so high. I also favor other approaches to the healthcare problem. There would be less marketbased but if we are going to go marketbased, the solution we have to at least you know, make it more like a free market. Right now it is essentially a big protectionist bracket where they have little territories and they can charge whatever they want. Host from your most recent book, voters in america not only arent over empowered, for decades now they have been almost totally disenfranchised, subjects are one of the more brilliant change suppression space. Im going to read that warmer time. Voters in america arent only over empowered for decades now theyve almost been totally disenfranchised subjects of one of the more brilliant change suppressing systems ever invented. Guest yeah. All i was saying was that it is all the things that we talked about here today. Voters, theyve only had two choices for the most part. Both of those choices have tendencies to be supported by the same gigantic corporate donors. There is a weeding out process that has been happening before people even get to the point where they actually get to make a political choice. We essentially eliminate everybody who doesnt have the assent of the National News media, the political donor class, and Major Political parties. That is going to has closely guarded the power for decades in this country. And yes, we get to choose between one of two parties are acceptable to the groups but that is not a terribly wide amount of political choice. Interestingly, trump broke that mold. He was a true outsider anyway. He did not mean the money of the donor class to get elected. He did not use the media to get elected in a traditional way. And he was an outsider to the Republican Party. So he did not use their political missionary. So there is a blueprint now for somebody else to get elected unfortunately when we finally have a real political choice. I think spent it on the wrong person but it was interesting. Host the next call for matt taibbi comes from linda in phoenix. Caller i loved your talking about the great russian writers that we read in new york in public schools. In high school in the public schools. My question or comment is during the course of this whole program, the essence has been a very bleak picture here in the United States. The polarization. I go back, my generation is the vietnam war generation. And even then in the 50s we were not as polarized economically, politically, culturally as we are today. It is so disturbing to keep for persons of my generation right now, we cant see this continuing on as it is. How can we continue on as a sovereign nation with a government that is inoperable . That is glaringly inoperable. And all i can see is, given history, the division, the strong divisions and an electric where one in six persons believes that democracy is not important to them. How can this not eventually erupt and civil unrest to the, host thank you linda. Lets leave it there and lets hear from matt taibbi. Guest i totally agree with you linda. I think we are in an age of polarization that when we are going in a direction that is unsustainable, i remember way back when i was running the great derangement. Actually even before that. I did a story where i was like undercover working and the Bush Campaign in 2004. I remember listening to people. Which was back then just about republicans but the thing that was really interesting to me that they didnt have a vision of the country that included the you know sort of liberals. All they really want to, their idea, this sort of fantasy conception of the perfect america was a you know these liberal professors and actors from hollywood and media figures. They just did not exist anymore. They did not want to get along with them or they just wanted them kind of out of the way. I thought well wow, that is such a negative vision of the country. We need a vision where everyone can find a way to get along and they dont have that. Now i see the same thing going on with the other side. I see there is a new kind of politics that i think has come up in the last year or so where its not if you are a democrat sometimes its not about here is what we stand for positively. The biggest thing that they are about is being against republicans. They dont have a vision of the country that includes republicans and look, i understand their frustrations. People are angry, they believe that the republicans made a racist choice. They are misogynist, but you know we have to live together ultimately. All of us. And so there has to be somebody has to come up with a way that allows us all to talk to each other again. I dont know what that is but i think that is the magic formula Going Forward. We have to have some kind of national reconciliation. I hope it is sooner rather than later. Host and clown president. Matt taibbi writes politics is to be predictable. Every four years the many amenities he would team up with party hats and way behind whatever part of a candidate proved most adept of snowing the population into buying the same crappy policies that they have bought. They 2016 change all of that . Guest i think it did. Host for the future also . Guest possibly. Having with trump and to a lesser extent, sanders upset the card. Maybe forever. Because the formula has changed now. Again, in the old days in order to win, in order to actually get to the white house as opposed to just being interesting and a factor like ross perot, to actually win you need the Institutional Support of the party. The money and the press. Now, you know what trump and sanders both showed is that the voting public has a way of thinking for itself now. It does not include this institutional bureaucratic structure. And so it is not a simple matter of a bunch of people with money getting together with the party elders and deciding whos going to be a salesman and who is going to sell the policies to the people. Now it is a bit of an open season. Anybody can run. Anybody can win. And you know in the case of donald trump it turned out to be a negative. But it is interesting at least. It opened up a range of possibilities. Host how long did it take you to write a paragraph like that we just read . Guest i dont know. I write fairly quickly i guess. I obsessed. I think writers do this different ways. I have heard, i read philip ross once that somebody likes the way he writes that he writes with 500 words a day or Something Like that. I may be missing this was about but the whole point was that you know they would get the sentence correct ahead of time and then commit it to paper than handwritten. I put text down pretty quickly. Within i go back and play with it until it is smaller and tighter and so it, everybody does it a different way. Host campaigns native people only as props. Matt taibbi writes if a candidate wanted to show they have here she was with us on racial issues that candidate would visit a predominantly black high school and be photographed. Clapping to a school band performance. If he wanted a worker friendly image she would visit a robotics factory in wisconsin and be photographed wearing a hard hat and goggles and so on. Guest and again, this is the same thing that i was talking about before. You dont really need people to be a politician anymore. You need them to be props for photo ops. But to actually talk to them, have their supports you know, they had mastered a way of learning elections that did not necessarily involve the you know the active participation of voters. And they were able to do it through money, stagecraft, production values, all of that stuff allowed them to bypass the oldschool version of politics we had to actually go into the union halls and for the elks club and convince people. It is not done that way anymore. And trump incidentally is pioneering and even more interesting way of running politics which is you he didnt even have a campaign. He was a human being appearing on television and he just let the entire media system be his campaign structure. And he did not even need staff let alone people to run his campaign. That was interesting. Host sometimes his speeches would just be risk. Guest yes they were pretty much all entirely that. My first busing journalism was the late Wayne Barrett who was an Investigative Reporter here at the village voice. He died early this year. But he was one of his first biographers. I talked to wayne about trump in one of the things he told me was that donald trump has never once in his life read a prepared text until his father died. He read something at his funeral. And so i watched out for that. And what you would see on the campaign trail with trump was, you go to a place and sometimes his campaign would distribute a flyer that would have the prepared remarks on it. And first line would Say Something like, so great to be back in manchester. And he would say its so good to be back in manchester. And then the second line on was all ad lib. He is a constitutionally incapable of sticking to a script. Although he did briefly after steve bannon got hired for a job that was interesting but the net change the campaign when he did this bizarre thing about reaching out to the africanamerican voter and he actually read those speeches. And he could see he was almost like a prisoner of war reading. But for the most part he just got up there and i think even he doesnt know what hes going to say most of the time. Host the next call for matt taibbi comes from elizabeth in san marcos california. Please go ahead, we are listening. Caller hi, i love your work matt. I called in to mention that obama never really gets credit for landing the plan after the economy was headed off the cliff. You know then the plane landed on the ocean and everybody got into the lifeboat and republicans refused to row. With that as a backdrop i think it really affected obamas ability in his early days to get a lot of things accomplished like singlepayer given her Health Systems like the economy at that time. All of these jobs to eliminate those at that point would have been catastrophic. Anyway you want to jump in and ask you a question. I dont think that donald trump number one, we have now a shattered media environment. Donald trump sent out treats and everybody is going around like a laser pointer. And big issues are not getting addressed. Everyone is running off to talk about some insane things and the underlying issues that democracy really demands a lot of it is boring. You know try to get 100 people in a room to agree on anything and that is kind of what the system is built on. And by would you agree that you know a media environment today, donald trump didnt do it alone. I mean the radios are conservative. And fox news is there showing an alternate universe from what we have seen on cnn. So the idea that cnn and msnbc created trump, i dont necessarily buy that. Given the number of men that have jobs in the country today, you know that is his driving around the middle of the country. They are listening to Rush Limbaugh and you know theres so many conservative talkers and there are very few liberal talkers. Anyway could you comment on that a little bit . Thank you. The one that is elizabeth from san marcos. Caller lets quickly talk about the first thing. Guest that is near and dear to my heart, the whole issue of barack obama and his response to the financial crisis. I remember talking to people on wall street before obama took office. During the transition in 2008 when the economy is in full meltdown mode. They were still in the construction of the ballots. This was almost a completely bipartisan production pair with a they were essentially senses of george w. Bush and hank paulson started while the economy began to tank in september. But beyond that i remember talking to lots of people on wall street and you know, not everybody has this but some people have this view. Looking forward to barack obama coming into office because he was somebody who had incredible communication skills and to be able to get up in front of a country and explain what happened with the subprime mortgage crisis. It was incredibly involved, complicated fraud that had essentially been perpetrated on the market. And it had disproportionately targeted you know people of color and lower income individuals that have this massive foreclosure crisis and obama really didnt do that. He elected to not address the root cause of the crisis and his response to it and he did, he continued a policy that republicans study which was to essentially throw a huge sum of money at the Financial Services sector to allow them to get well again and they did. And it worked to a degree. But there were persistent structural problems that were left in place. That laid the groundwork i think for future problems in the i understand that he inherited this probate lease in the area of the stuff that i covered i think he was disappointing. At least on that level. Because he was somebody this was a difficult topic for the public. And he really just declined to do it. When he got a chance to talk about on 60 minutes he said some of the unethical behavior on wall street was not illegal. It is true but it doesnt mean that other bad behavior on wall street wasnt illegal. It just means some of it wasnt illegal. And i think he was trying to split the baby in a way with the issue and that was disappointing to me. On the other issue about you know donald trump not doing it on the only thing i would say to that is afternoon radio and fox and the daily caller and all of those things barack obama overcame them. And he won an election by 10 million votes in 2008. I dont think the media landscape is not an insuperable obstacle to a skilled politician. That would happened with the trump cspan. Org there was a perfect storm of a disaffected public. A candidate who was taking advantage of the reality show format of the coverage and there was a democratic candidate that was kind of in disarray. And fed into the rhetoric that trump was putting out there. He had all of that. The politicians failed. Host back and climbed present. Trump supporters are people tired of being told they need to be part of a coalition in order to have a vote. The alienated minorities especially by members of their own party. Guest this is something oddly enough that david from talked about in an article from the atlantic. After romney lost in 2012, the republicans looked at the results and said if we just did a little bit better with hispanics, we would probably have had won the election peers of the started casting a vote for a candidate who would have a softer message on immigration. And that was why jeb bush and up with 100 million in his campaign efforts. Early on in that race. But it turned out that the republican electric was in a completely different place. Does not where they wanted to go. They did not want to be a more inclusive party. They do not want to be more openminded. They did not want to invite more people to attend. They wanted what donald trump was selling. He wanted to close the borders and send everybody back and so i think the party was out of touch and they were probably right in terms of where the party should have gone. And is a different matter to convince people to go there. Host thank you for watching cspan2 matt taibbi is with us this month. And we have greg calling in from massachusetts. Caller hi mike, how are you doing . Host it is matt taibbi. If i said mike i apologize. Caller i really appreciate the way that you can transfer your complicated stuff like financial world and come out and explain it and make it clear. There is another area that is very complicated that no one touches on about why we have an insane clown president. Why there are some insane things. It is biology. There is a doctor homer in the early 80s approved the cause of all disease and mental disease is caused by shock to the system. This is all proven. He is like snowden living in norway. They wont even let him out at all. And i was wondering, a cynical person that can go through russian and financial stuff and really get to the bottom of it. But no one brings up biology. That we are animals doing all of this. Host okay we are going to leave it there matt from massachusetts. We have matt taibbi here new york. Any response for that . Guest i do not know that doctors work so i do not think i can comment on it. Im not against doing medical stories but that sounds like a big one to try and tackle. I dont know. Host you do not need to comment if you dont want to. This is an email from marcelis. Two things why is one of your favorite writers and why did you leave intercept online . Guest i will answer the second question first. I was going to do a publication or a website]. Which is going to be part of the First Look Media empire and all i can say is it did not work out. I disagreements with management and unfortunately the project never got off the ground. It was too bad we had a lot of talented cool people there. We were trying to recreate i dont know if you remember sky magazine. But we want to do something kind of like that and it just did not work out unfortunately. Host was there a money issue . Guest no, it was complicated. It was an interpersonal thing i would say. A clash of philosophies. You know, i just didnt i may not be the best boss in the world either. So i think that it did not work out. But it is too bad but it you know they were really good people for the most part. In terms of sake, he is not very well known to american audiences. A writer named Hector Hugh Munro is a little bit similar in style. Sake had a much darker blacker sense of humor. If i remember correctly his mother was trampled to death by a cow. So he, he wrote a letter short stories that were sort of famous for having a very you know there was often a terrible animal in the story. And people were getting torn apart and things like that begin a very nasty dark view of the sort of upper crust. This was the last phase of the British Empire and he was a brilliant wordsmith. Very screwed up person personally. But he wrote this gorgeous, incredibly funny stories that were really some of my favorites growing up. I actually named my second son, his middle name is munro after sake. I strongly advise anyone who has never read his stories to go to that because they are really short. You can read them in and a half an hour but they are just really so funny. It is too bad that he is not better known. Host have you had any interaction with the Trump White House at this point . Guest i have. Ive talked to some people in the Trump White House. Not on the record though. I think one of the things that happened when this russia story started to break is i just for my own curiosity, i tried to figure out a lot of things. I have been calling a lot of people in congress and the senate and the white house. Trying to make sense of it but i have not done enough to be able to report on. So unfortunately i do not have anything i can really contribute. Host Eric Levinson tweets that thereto stories that matt conflates. Did russia interfere in the election . Did donald trump collude with russia . Is actually what i do not conflate. I have said from the beginning that and if you look back you will see this in the first stories i wrote about this. I would not be surprised at all if russia was responsible for the hack of the dnc. Later when donald trump himself said i think it was probably russia, i wrote about that too. I dont actually conflate both things. I think the problem is that people do conflate them. My issue with the story is okay lets say is true, right . It doesnt necessarily follow that donald trump and the russians colluded to do this. If you think about it from a logical point of view theres no upside to the russians even to involve trump in that caper if they wanted to. That is the problem that i have. His people think that when i am saying i dont see proof of the collision im saying nothing happened. Im not saying that. I am saying that if you want to call someone a traitor who has committed espionage against United States i you need something more solid than i think so. That is where i am with that. Host james in Denham Springs louisiana. Whenever i read your Rolling Stone articles about politicians and misconduct i get so mad that i have to put down the magazine and get a drink or take a walk around the block. The get just as many are writing about these . Guest yes. Sometimes. But you know, writing about is kind of the way you exercise that a little bit. Again, part of the job is to get upset. You try to find ways to make sure that you are responding correctly to something as horrible. You know i think it tom if youre not getting upset than that is lena something is going on. And you probably have been doing it for too long. Host phil, portland, oregon. You have a few minutes left with matt taibbi. Caller hello cspan hello matt. Just a quick comment. A quick comment before my question. This story is quite sustainable as long as from office continues. The 90 percent answer to this my question, you write about the wall street grabbing of pensions. Is that public and private . And can it be stopped . Can they be controlled . And is there too much risk to public and private pensions . I will take my answer off the air. Thank you. Guest thank you. I wrote a lot about that in the last eight years. On a couple of different levels. One you know there is the question of who is managing public Pension Funds . And that is a separate issue. Theres a whole question of are we paying exorbitant fees for hedge funds that do not perform terribly well . And manage our money. I talked to someone he managed the pension fund in illinois. A Public Pension Fund and he said look, you know i am paying a few pennies to invest the workers money in this gigantic fund and they are performing these hedge funds that the pay tens of millions of dollars to manage. So why would i bother . Because over a long period of time, and all Pension Funds are essentially longterm so these will do well for the most part. But it was more pertinent to stuff that i did was the fact that when these gigantic Financial Companies were selling Properties Like the prime mortgage instruments, they very often targeted these big Institutional Investors like Pension Funds because what they would do is, they would pick someone who manages the funds that might make 70 500,000 and they would take the person to vegas or the super bowl and hang out with them for a week and then that person next thing you know is by 20 million worth of some products. What happened in the financial crisis that we saw losses of 25, 30 or 35 percent across the board in these Pension Funds. Public and private because they were buying huge masses of these, essentially worthless subprime mortgage instruments. It was a game. Its the same as people calling up their grandparents and offering them overpriced magazine subscriptions. You know you have a vulnerable buyer and you just seven is much as you can have a worthless product. And that is what happened in the financial crisis. It was so disturbing and so predatory and sociopathic. But it was not terribly well explained to the public. That is one of the things i was trying to get at. Host matt taibbi, some wanted to pick up one of her books which one would you recommend . Guest right now i think divide. That is why im happiest about. Host that came out in 2014. Guest yes, i spent a lot of time reporting on that book. I think its the most elaborate of the books i read but i have another one coming out this year that i am really excited about. It is about a case here in new york. Im really looking forward to seeing how that one does. Host the divide income equality, incarceration and equality, those are the main topics. Guest yes. Basically i had been covering whitecollar crime for a long period of time i started writing this. After a period of time, i kept running up against this issue of these guys are doing these incredible scams in their ripping off enormous sums of money. And some of them are brilliant amazing crimes in their complexity. But theyre not doing any time. Even when they get caught they never get punished for it. And so in order to try to bring out for readers how outrageous and ridiculous that was i had to try and understand how easy it was for other people to go to jail and that was something i didnt know a lot about. So the divide is really kind of exploration where i would go to these various places and talk to people who have been in prisons and they got to jail and how easy it is for an ordinary person to end up with a record. Whereas i follow these other cases that are incredibly elaborate and instructive and in the end no one ends up having to pay a single sent or do a day in jail. It is a story that you cannot tell unless its a comparing in contrast exercise. That is what it is this vast exercise. Showing two different justices. Host lee and maryland. You are on booktv. Good afternoon. Caller good afternoon john appeared really great show today peter. I used to enjoy hearing you on imus in the morning. Of course is not on anymore but anyway you really had some good badger with him. I, you and i are old enough to remember when the communist world is known as the red menace. And the godless comedies. Things like that. When the cold war was going on and with good reason. Now of course the country called russia is run by a kgb by the name of Vladimir Putin. He is cut out of the same cloth. They still murder people, they still do all of these terrible things all around the world. They support the genocidal regime in syria. They are not the red menace anymore. They are not the evil empire that reagan used to call them. But there are a bunch of gangsters and thoughts. Yet, we have a president who constantly singing the praises of the russians. His National Security advisor initially Michael Flynn was in bed with them. His soninlaw is in bed with them. This is outrageous absolutely outrageous i dont get it. Host is that your point . That is outrageous . Or did you want to ask a question . Caller that is it. Guest okay, i mean look, i was in russia where Vladimir Putin became president. I wrote long long features about how horrible he was back then. I knew exactly who he was. I knew we came from. I was with colleagues and supporters who disappeared. People who are dead today. You know because they didnt get along with regime. No one is more sensitive than me to the inequity of Vladimir Putins russia. I am totally aware of that. I think that it is a little bit of a stretch though to say that let me just say it this way, four years ago barack obama was debating mitt romney on television and mitt romney said russia was the biggest threat facing the world. Barack obama said the 80s want their Foreign Policy back and he suggested that look, russia is what it is. But it is probably better for us to get along or find some way to not be completely hostile enemies with them. Then for us to go back to what was in the past. I think that there is some merit to that. The two nuclear powers. What happened in theory was an incredibly dangerous thing. When donald trump was lobbing missiles into syria and their Russian Forces on the ground there i mean that is a very very tense situation for that is something i worry about most of all with the Trump Administrations nuclear war. And russia is what it is. You do not have to agree with it. I dont like the regime there. I have never liked regime there. We are probably better off not in a constant state of hostility with russia then we are in one. At least that is my experience. And you know of course if you asked russia about four russians about their view of americans, they will have almost exactly the same thing to say about us. For instance, if you think about the 1996 election which i was also therefor. We openly meddled in that election. And we stood in risers for the Boris Yeltsin campaign. If you look it says a headline yanks to the rescue because we openly write about how we helped him win reelection. In the russians still resent that. So there is angst on both sides and yes, it is a terrible regime. Yes there world regime and the abuse journalist and they crackdown on all kinds of freedoms and they support awful regimes and that is who they are. But we are better off not at war than we are at war with them. Host east lansing michigan. Emails i was pleased to see you discussing jonathan gates. A very important book, the righteous mind. In the spirit, what do you see as conservatives best point and what you see as the biggest struggle . Guest the best point of conservatives . Host yes. And the biggest shortcoming. Guest i think there is a complaint out there and conservative america that that certain liberal minds and liberal media has become more orthodox and unaccepting of ideas. And more hostile. I do not know if thats true or not but i think that you know from their point of view from conservatives point of view as they would say is liberals run hollywood. They were in the media, they run campuses. We see the world being taken over and thats all we are so angry. I am not sure that its the completely invalid point of view. I think that there is some truth to the fact that the conservative point of view is often excluded automatically. Do i agree with it . No. But i think that it does happen. But you in terms of the weakest point if you just take the color before he was talking about the black and hispanic people are the root of all evil. I think that kind of talk has become increasingly normalized. Especially the sort of fringe conservative media and stuff that you see on a lot of the sites now is scary to me. Frankly. Host a couple of facebook comments. Lets take them in order. This is harley. I would like to know if you think donald trump can really make a difference in fighting global terror bombs including modern england . Guest i dont think so. I think he is unsuited to deal with the terrorism problem. I think it is a problem of enormous complexity. It requires somebody who has a profound knowledge of all of the different relationships and historical grievances in the region. In the middle east. I think you need to have someone who knows the difference between egypt and yemen and between the shiites and the sunnis. And donald trump does not know the difference between any of that stuff. Its just all one big area that needs to be bombs to him. I think that is a failing of american foreignpolicy. In unwillingness to kind of learn about whats going on in that part of the world. It was a problem when we invaded iraq frankly. We have this incredibly simplistic idea that we were going to go in there and it was going to be switzerland six weeks later. You know in this great flowering of western valleys going to take place. We did that because we have no idea who these people were. We were interested in their point of view and we didnt care about their history, their pride and culture. Nothing there are problems over there but we are not going to solve it does by shaking our fist and dropping bombs on it. I dont think that works. Host Joseph Oppenheimer posted on facebook. Matt, the world is the most peaceful prosperous healthy, eccentrically this is coincided with the growth of capitalism, big banks, Multinational Companies etc. Thus our united to think the little guy has been screwed . Guest i dont know why you asked the little guy to outthink him in the country have been, real incomes have been declining steadily since 1970. You know the inequality has grown at an enormous rate. You know the top one percent of the country is making dozens of times what it was making relative to the rest of the country even 40 or 50 years ago. And yes, if you look at overall at the level of wealth in places like china, you might see a better interleaving but in other parts of the world we have seen other phenomenons that are entirely negative like the inequality, the collapse of sovereign nations and places like africa and the have just seen less water in the world in the last 30 or 40 years. So i understand that global capitalism has resulted in a lot of progress. But there are issues and those underlie a lot of, frankly a lot of the political grievances going on today. Host sean in hawaii. We have one minute left. Caller aloha from hawaii. Matt, what is your favorite hawaiian and Filipino Food . And because you are Rolling Stone writer, what is your favorite album or band . Hello ha hello how. Guest i like this crazy ice cream kind of thing i dont know how to explain it. My wife is filipino also. So we eat a little bit of Filipino Food at home every now and then. Hawaiian food i dont know. I have only been to hawaii once. Ive never met my relatives there is a matter of fact. I am ignorant as far as that goes. Albert pujols, who was musical taste in the world. Im too embarrassed to share my musical preferences with people on air. So thats why they keep me away from his Rolling Stone. They never asked me to write about it. Host did a good bit disco or the bee gees . Guest i like rap music a lot but i like everything frankly. I think the ordinary person her rose into the think that i am a geek. Host have you noticed that your books over the years, this came out, smells like dead elephants. The name is done at the bottom. This year, your name is very big let us. Did you notice that all that your name is growing . Guest i had not thought about that that is cool though. I guess host all right. Three hours, matt taibbi has been our guest on book tv in depth. Quickly these are list of his books for beginning with the exile, which came out in 2000. It is about drugs and the reliable new russia. Spanking this cannot after the 04 election. Smells like dead elephants dispatches from a rotting empire came in 2007. The great derangement came out in 2009. The story of bakers politicians and the most audacious grab in history. 2011. The divide which mr. Matt taibbi recommends is the book to pick up. American injustice in the age k9 2014 viewed his most recent book this year, insane clown president. Mr. Matt taibbi thank you for your time on book tv. Guest thank you. My pleasure to introduce david davenport, the author of rugged individualism dead or alive. 0 also Research Fellow at the Research Institute and previously the president of pepperdine university. David, thank you very much for coming to share this with us. [applause] thank you, george, and ladies and gentlemen, its a pleasure to be with you today. Occurred to me as we collected up yet one more spring rain and were competing with the