Transcripts For CSPAN2 In Depth With Matt Taibbi 20170610

Recent book insane clown met iab in depth, your most recent book insane clown president dispatches from the 2016 circus. You write about donald trump, quote, no ordinary conman, he is way above average, the american political system is his easiest mark ever. That was early in the campaign. That was in march 2016. It was around the time he was sewing up the republican nomination and the purpose of that article, this is a compilation of articles to try to explain the trump phenomenon to people who were for the first time having to take it seriously and come to grips that this was happening. I took a different approach to trump and tried to listen to what his supporters were saying and focus on what he was doing. My take on him that he was a Brilliant Media manipulator who was perfectly suited to play on the weaknesses of the american political media and that turned out to be true. I wish i had stuck to my guns. Later on in the book i didnt believe he would be president. Host the day after the election you wrote i did not the donald trump coming. Everybody felt that way. They did. I did see a long time ago that we were going to have a problem with this sort of post factual media atmosphere and for which trump is perfectly suited. I even wrote a book about it a long time ago called the great derangement a terrifying true story of war, politics, and religion but i never thought donald trump specifically. He was a unique character and what was unique about him was in sight was the american president ial election was a big reality show but it was a bad reality show with bad characters and he made it an engrossing impossible to miss reality show that he was perfectly suited for it. Host you write Donald Trumps innovation was to recognize that a bad tv show the campaign was, any program tries to make stars out of human sedatives like scott walker and Lindsey Graham needed new producers and a new script. Exactly. We had for a long time in the media been drifting away from substantive policy reporting and more and more played up the storytelling aspect, production values aspect of it, pageantry, debates covered like sports contests. We had pregame shows where people instead of prognosticating who would win, these amazing graphics with surveys showing how the person was doing according to what he or she was saying and trump looked at that format and internally he said wouldnt it be amazing if you put a professional reality actor in the middle of this and took advantage of this stagecraft and that is what he did. A lot of the professional politicians are good enough on camera, able to deliver a speech composed for them by their staff but they are not able to do what trump does and attract attention to the degree he is able to do. Host when you are covering this for Rolling Stone did you develop a respect for his Campaign Style or his ability . Guest respect is an odd word. I definitely understood and appreciated what he was doing. I saw early on that trump was operating on a different level than other candidates. Scene i described in the book where State University in new hampshire, the press is always in the middle of the hall, behind a rope line and there are these risers and camera men are standing there and trump started to make up part of the act. In the middle of his speech he would interrupt himself and say look at these vultures, they hate me, never traveled so far for any event. Didnt believe i could do this and the crowd would physically turn toward us and sometimes start to boo and hiss and it got very menacing and to me it was incredible because trump was taking something boring, the american political stump speech which is usually a very lifeless event with very scripted, careful delivery and turned it into this menacing wwe style performance and it was very memorable. You could see they left the hall and worked up and it was very unusual for a political event and hard not to miss. Host you were standing at trump tower and somebody walked up and asked if you were a reporter. I think he swore at me and when i said yes i have a lot of experiences like that and this is been happening for quite a long time before trump even came on the scene, reporters had been more and more unpopular over the years, 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, but what he did was made a common enemy out of the media and presented us as the elitist upperclass enemy, what he basically said as we both hate these people and that was his link to the common man. That trick of using us and bringing us into the speech and making us characters in the story was incredibly effective. We solved his excessive only problem. Host you call the american political system an easy mark. What do you mean . What trump did, our political system especially our system of political media is set up in a way that is totally irrational and doesnt work well for the body politic. We are a commercial system of media which means almost all the people covering the president ial election need to get ratings and descriptions and hits in order to make money and so anybody who does those things, who gets ratings for the media will have massive advantage over anybody else. Doesnt matter what your politics are. If you are donald trump, you working making money for the network they will cover you. That was a major factor early in the race. There was a statistically trump got 23 times the tv coverage Bernie Sanders did. That wasnt for any substantive reason. It was because trump was making money. That vulnerabilities that we had to somebody it was a good commercial vehicle made it easy for someone 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 . Very difficult and frustrating assignment. First time i did it for a long stretch was in 2004, you are basically stuck in the same environment with the same people over and over and over again for days and weeks on end and especially in the later stages of the campaign when the secret service gets involved you are literally trapped in this environment, you cant leave the rope line. You have to stay with the same people and talk to them and you are stuck with the candidate, the candidates aids and other reporters and they are the only people you are getting information from and so what happens in this environment, this is a big factor was trump, you dont spend a lot of time talking to actual people and you miss a lot of phenomena that are going on out there. We get our information from things like holes, that tells us what is going on. That is how we take the temperature of the people but it is not an accurate way of discerning what is going on. That kind of bubble can be stifling and suffocating and strange. It is a weird atmosphere to live in for a long time. Host reading your most recent couple of books, do we draw a direct line from howard dean to ron paul, Dennis Kucinich to donald trump . I think so. They were all protest candidates to begin with. The difference was in the old days the press had the power to kind of take these protect candidates and marginalize them. The establishment media collectively decided a person like Dennis Kucinich was not fit for the presidency they would just describe him as not really a candidate. It would be subtle at sometimes, unsubtle at other times, sometimes the candidate would weigh the edge in is the debate and other times describe them as a fringe candidate but other times host cover the speeches and signal to audiences who is the real candidate and who isnt the real candidate. We have the front runners and these are curiosities. What happened this time around was there was so much animosity to the system and the establishment media and this whole beltway complex kingmaking group that decided who gets to be president and who doesnt get to be president that the voters for their energy into candidates like trump and Bernie Sanders who made in selling point was i dont belong to that club. That is what they did. They stood in front of audiences and said these people over here want to tell you who your president is going to be and i am defying that. Vote for me and people flocked to those candidacies so in the old days i watched as the press basically tore apart candidates like howard dean and Dennis Kucinich and ron paul and tried to do it to trump this time except he defied the instinct. We tried to get rid of him, he just wouldnt have it. He wouldnt exit the stage. Do you feel Rolling Stone and your self are part of the Mainstream Media . Yes and no. We have been around for so long, i guess you would call us we are not corporate media. That is an important distinction. We are privately owned. But our coverage is kind of tradition, it has an around for 50 years. He wouldnt describe us as a threadbare alternative Media Publication anymore. That would be an inaccurate description. We are somewhere if someone read Hunter F Thompson from 1972 would they relate to it today . Absolutely. Hunter thompsons books are timeless. I think of them more as being great works of fiction than i do journalism becomes irrelevant in a very short period. Hard to read journalism 50, 60 years later and really get into it but Hunter Thompsons books are like great novels. Fear and loathing on the campaign trail i always think of. I wrote this once for one of the introductions to one of those books, reminded me of a book like the castle or the trial because it is an incredible story of this guy searching for meaning and justice in this horrible construction of fakeness and lies and treachery with these awful villains populating the landscape. Never quite able to find happiness and truth and validation. Those books are incredible to me. They will last another 200 years. Host in your book the great derangement a terrifying true story of war, politics, and religion you write you were losing faith in political and national institutions. This is something i saw a long time ago and worried about a lot, that there was a trend on the left and the right. In america we use catchphrases like left and right because there is no other shorthand for politics. It is inaccurate but we have to. People were increasingly tuning out the, quote, Mainstream Media, they were going and seeking out their own stranger, sometimes more conspiratorial media sources. The internet is an incredible invention but one of the things it is good at doing is matching people with their opinions. When people read the news these days, instead of turning on abc, cbs or nbc as they did in a 70s, now they can craft their own realities, these are the five publications that describe the world in a way that i agree with and go on to the internet and read those five things and that is how they get their news. What started to happen at the end of the 2000s, people were beginning to retreat into their own camps, there was no common set of facts we were debating and that was the precursor to this election where we couldnt agree on what the facts were. Host is that a negative . Guest yes, i think so. It is a bad thing. It is a bad thing when the entire society cant even agree on the terms of an argument. We dont debate each other on issues or policies anymore, we disagree on the literal facts of the argument. That is a very difficult place for us to be if we cant even agree on what happened, then it becomes very difficult for people to come to anythings more substantive than that. This is been going on a while now and it is a result of the fracturing of the media landscape which is only getting more fractured as time goes on. Now you rarely see a News Organization that tries to reach the entire population. We go demographic hunting. We say here are our readers or viewers and we will craft the news that audience, they are going to love us and these people wont and that is unfortunate. Host in a recent Rolling Stone column, the title of it, you wrote roger ailes was one of the worst americans ever. Guest roger ailes died and get it back to Hunter Thompson i was thinking about his famous obituary of nixon, and 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 hands in the morning. I was trying to do something similar for roger ailes but roger ailes to me was the main driver of this phenomenon of lets target a demographic, give them news that they like and forget about these other people over here. He talked about it, my audience is age 55 to dead. They dont want to hear about working women or liberals, they dont want them to exist. They crafted a news program for that audience and that started us down the road of this divided media landscape where we are basically a population split into camps and we have our own news sources and dont agree on anything and he was a pioneer of that. Host to go back to the 70s when we all listened to the same news, was it good at nbc, abc and cbs essentially in many ways controlled what we heard, what we thought . Guest look, it was an information monopoly, i read manufacturing consent, i agree with the premise of the book that it is very easy to control the opinions of population if you only have a few media sources and they were always some pad ago, in line with policy objectives, permanent government of the United States, all that stuff was tremendously negative, it wasnt diverse. I grew up in the media, my father was in the media, it was a very different kind of news landscape. The only thing in its favor was they had a different attitude towards the purpose of the news backs and. The original conception of how the news was supposed to work was if you go back to the Telecommunications Act of the 30s the idea was government would leave the airwaves to these private companies and in exchange these private companies were supposed to provide a Public Service in the form of meaningful news. They were supposed to make their money doing entertainment or sports and news was supposed to be a loss leader and it didnt have to be profitable and they were only there in their minds to present something factual and useful to the public. Even though it was incredibly biased and led us into wars like vietnam and excluded lots of voices, there was an urge their to get the story correct that isnt necessarily true now. Now we are crafting an entertainment product for people and people consume the news the same way they consume entertainment which is unfortunate. Host back to the great derangement a terrifying true story of war, politics, and religion, the derangement i describe in this book kicked off when americans finally figured out they had been a trade by the mainstream political system that still failed to abandon the old paradigm. Guest yes. Wasnt like we had a revolution, right . There was a frustration with people, they didnt trust their politicians, they didnt trust the media but they didnt have an alternative they trusted either so there was a lot of incoherent frustration and anger in the population looking for an outlet and i think that left us ripe for things that happened last year with donald trump, there was an enormous number of people who were discontent and they were looking for any change, almost irrespective of what the change was. We saw amazing polls last year the two of three people favored a new direction and didnt care what the direction was. That hugely favored somebody like trump. He came in and his main argument to people was whatever you think of me, i am not what you 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 you supported Hillary Clinton . Guest that is unfortunately a consequence of how again how americans consume the media now. It is assumed that if you write something negative about one party is a must support the other party and that is the consequence of politicized media that i think people like roger ailes pioneered. If you Say Something negative about the clintons you must be a conservative. That unfortunately is the kind of materialist view of what news is as opposed to just being sometimes people have negative feelings about both candidates or are trying to be objective and call things as they are, it is not a political act to cover somebody in a positive or negative way. Host from insane clown president dispatches from the 2016 circus. Where did that book come from . Guest there is a band called insane clown posse. I was trying to come up with something that would hang on donald trump for a year, not want to be subtle in your marketing ideas. Who did the drying on the front . Guest of insane clown president dispatches from the 2016 circus to give victor youhaas, illustrator for Rolling Stone. We have worked together for a decade now. He has the same basically disturbed sense of humor that i do. We had a lot of fun during that. Host from that book the clintons should have left politics the moment they decided they didnt care what the public thought about how they made their money. Guest that was an amazing detail in some of the reporting that his come out. Among other things in books like shattered, they describe this moment where Hillary Clinton essentially said when she was trying to decide whether or not to accept what turned into over 100 million in speaking fees by taking his this tour of various banks and big corporations, she said they will write negative things about me whatever i do. That was the substance of the quote. Cant remember exactly what she said. When you are in that place with a politician, basically saying it doesnt matter what i do anymore, people are going to hate me no matter what, what that means in my mind is you are no longer really worrying what the public thinks about you which is a dangerous place for a politician to be. Host good afternoon and welcome to booktv on cspan2, this is our monthly in depth program. This is where we invite one author to talk about his or her body of work and we have Rolling Stone correspondent and author matt taibbi. Matt taibbi is the author of several books. His first one came out in 2000 called the exile, sex, drugs and libel in the new russia, spanking the donkey, dispatches from the dung season came out in 2005. Smells like dead elephants, dispatches from the rotting empire came out in 2007. The great derangement a terrifying true story of war, politics, and religion which we talked about a little bit, 2009. s most recent books are griftopia bubble machines, vampire squids, and the long con that is breaking america, 2011, the divide american injustice in the age of the wealth gap in 2014, and finally this past year, insane clown president dispatches from the 2016 circus. This is your chance to call in and talk with matt taibbi about his work. 20 numtwo7488200. East and central towns on, 7088201. If you cant get through on the phone lines, still wants to make a comment, we have social media ways to get through including twitter booktv is our twitter handle. Use that, we will be able to see it and maybe use it. You can make a comment on our facebook page, facebook. Com booktv. You will see a piece with matt taibbi and you can make a comment underneath. We will put those comments on the air and you can send an email to booktv cspan. Org. We begin taking those calls in just a minute. How did you get into this business . It is the Family Business. Almost everybody i knew growing up is a reporter. My father was a News Reporter starting from the age of 18. Host that is mike. Guest he works at new york, wcbs and wnbc, he is retiring, does a little work for pbs but has been in business for 50 years. My stepmother was an anchor at cnn for a while, business anchor, beverly shook, and a lot my Family Friends growing up worked in places like the International Herald tribune. It was like the movie anchorman. I spent most of my formative years in local Television Affiliates with bad facial hair and stuff like that. I never wanted to do this for a living, wanted to be a novelist. When it turned out my fiction was bad, i fell back into the Family Business and i have 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 11 or 12. That was never a question in my mind. Had a deep love of books. When i was a child, i was an only child, we moved a lot, books were tremendous solace to me. I was the press a lot. When i started to learn how to write i became obsessed with the idea, writing is like a religion. If you really get into it, you can never really complete the task of being perfect, so you have to constantly practice Getting Better and better. I became addicted to it at a very young age. I wanted to be a comic novelist. My heroes are all funny writers, people like socky, if you know who wrote hardwould dog and margarita, catch22, these were the things i wanted. That is what i wanted to do when i grew up and spent a lot of my early years trying to do that kind of thing and it didnt work out. Journalism has been great in a different way. It is an amazing profession because it allows you to see the whole world and meet this extraordinary range of people. It is great in a way that is more fulfilling than being a fiction writer. Host you said you are depressed a lot. Why . Guest some people i just depressed. Host do you think it is rosanna . Guest it probably is. Most people who have that problem would tell you it is a chemical thing in your brain. People who were my heroes also had the same problem. A famous russian writer, a terrible depressive, conquered it sitting at home and thinking of the funniest things all day long, that is how he got through it. That is something i did a lot in my teen years, tried to write things like that. That was a way of making sense of the world. Host in your bio it says you are a Sports Editor for the moscow times. Guest one of my first job living in russia, i studied in russia in 199091. I was there when it was communist and i went home, they had a revolution and i came back and i loved it in russia. One of the reasons is as a young, often depressed teenager and twentysomething america was a very difficult place to be because there was enormous pressure in america to be successful and happy and turn on the Television Everyone has perfect teeth and are thrilled. In russia everybody was depressed. When i got there, nobody had nice clothes, i fit right in here, this is perfect. When i went to study i went home, started stringing for various newspapers and sooner or later i ended up meeting people in moscow, expatriot newspaper and since i had a sports background, they gave me the Sports Editors job. Host how did you end a playing professional basketball . Guest i played basketball in college, in new york, a basketball player, in moscow, i was out at moscow State University i met this kid, playing a game, told me the capital of mongolia, the nba, mongolian basketball association, the only area, nba rules outside america. Sounded like so much fun. I quit my job the next day, passed up my stuff, when i got there i got a try out and got on one of the teams and i would have stayed for a long time. People recognize me on the streets. Host matt taibbi you have written about why is it important . Guest i dont know if it is important for anybody to know. I didnt particularly feel to deny it. I had a period in russia, we had a newspaper called the exile, like a nightlife guide. In a town like the wild west, communism collapsed. It was crazy at the time, we were doing a lot of crazy things, i had a serious drug problem at one point. Not that i particularly wanted anybody to know about it but when you have something i call attention to it. Host Rolling Stone since 2005. Your book griftopia bubble machines, vampire squids, and the long con that is breaking america came out in 2011. Alan greenspans rise to the top, one of the great stands of the time. Guest Alan Greenspan was a character i originally planned on doing a 2000 word section on him. To the whole history of the modern Financial Service industry, his attitude, it is derived from lack of i and rand, he was in accolades of hers. He was very famous for being this great predictor of economic events but when i looked it turned out he had been wrong about almost everything he ever predicted. He was mostly, sort of like a lot of famous hangers on who hang around rock bands or other celebrities, famous for being somebody who was really good at telling politicians what they wanted to hear. The gift of being like a president was what allowed him to serve in the capacity he did for so long, not that he was a great economist, it was that he was very skilled politician. Host the divide american injustice in the age of the wealth gap came out in 2014, what was thrown on the dock was not a wall street firm but housed in the opposite direction, moved to the north, a familyowned Community Bank in chinatown called abacus federal savings. Host there is a movie called abacus, small enough to jail, an incredible story because it is a familyowned chinese immigrant bank, two noodle shops and the only bank in the financial crisis and they were invited because of a series of small improprieties they reported to the authorities. They were eventually prosecuted for defrauding fannie mae but fannie mae never suffered loss in any of those transactions. What i was trying to show, you have a tiny regional banks surrounded by behemoth Financial Institutions the later settled from billions of dollars committing crimes on massive scales beyond what abacus did but none were federally prosecuted and that was because we have a new doctrine which is too big to failing too big to jail. We openly said people like for me former attorney general eric holder said they were reluctant to prosecute Certain Companies because they were worried about the, quote, collateral consequences to the larger economy. And if we are afraid to prosecute a big bank, you have to be small enough to prosecute. That happened in the face of abacus, small enough to prosecute, they were all found not guilty, highly recommend everybody watch the movie too. Host july 9, 2014, you were in the courtroom, these people were marched through in chains. Guest they brought them back for a photo op. Not one of the major bankers who got in trouble or were accused of wrongdoing after 2008, none had to so much as appear in a court room. All the big deals of the settlements between settlements between Jpmorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs were done in back rooms, no one had to sit on the dock or be publicly humiliated, small immigrant bank, needed a photo opportunity. They got them in a chain gang and dragged them into the court room, it wasnt up to us, in the courthouse but clearly a political thing and the purpose of telling that story was to show the dichotomy and how we treat different kinds of people when we are talking about people who dont have power, we treat someone way and when they do have connections they never sleep the inside of a court room. Host i sent a feeling of outrage on your part in this book. Guest of course. Outrage is an important component of being a reporter. I take issue, if you arent in touch with what is outrageous it is very difficult to do this job. You have to maintain a sense of that throughout the year, one of the things that happens to people in the press for a long time, you get outrage fatigue, you have seen so much horrible stuff and bad behaviors that you stop responding to things the way a normal person would. I have seen that before. You have to continually say this is not acceptable and find ways to get upset about it. Host from the divide american injustice in the age of the wealth gap, we have a hatred for the weekend poor and terror of the rich and successful in building a bureaucracy to those findings. Guest what i was trying to say was underlying what drives the policies to mass incarceration to stop and frisk, community policing, emptying pockets, and take people like hsbc, one of the Worlds Largest banks that gets caught laundering 800 million for narco terrorists etc. In south america, dont even prosecute those, what is underlying the policy divide is we feel extra for people, we worship people who make money. We have reverence and admiration for people who are, quote, Wealth Creators and the people we see as parasite and nuisances, we have no sympathy for them whatsoever, they belong in jail. I had an experience that was eyeopening when i was writing that book, and how do you walk, for possession on the other hand, those places are dangerous. He didnt mean it, without admitting it, i dont see that offender is deserving jail no matter what he or she does but these offenders grew up in bad neighborhoods, we send them to jail, that is what i was trying to get at, the psychological split. This hidden hostility towards people who are poor, he we we here in revere, and giving some insight into this. I see these kids selling blue jeans and stuff like that. And they disappear for three or four weeks, do a little bit in jail and come back in people selling to you, and Party Members, nobody did anything to them, and in soviet society, Party Members dont get in trouble but these people do get in trouble, and that is where we are. It is hard to reconcile. Host last book . Guest i think it goes beyond that. It raises a huge factor. Audience they look differently at a poor black person who gets bumped in his or her pocket then a white kid who gets the same thing. He is just going through a phase. Kids will be kids. But they Say Something very different. Host before we leave the divide american injustice in the age of the wealth gap you visited california and went through their welfare system. Guest again, what i was trying to show is big banks and Financial Companies that i covered. A lot of them were technically guilty of crimes like fraud, i talked to whistleblowers, if you want to prosecute these people here is the statute they are guilty of. I looked at how they treated those people and wanted to see how they treated crimes like welfare fraud. What that experience was like, talking to people on welfare, and the gigantic complex of forms, and the network of computers constantly searching the record and if there is any inconsistency at all they generate a fraud case and you will either be prosecuted for it or have benefits taken away, family benefits taken away, a Supreme Court case, once taking public aid, trying to show the dichotomy in how we treat people, you couldnt just go and fraud, prime mortgage fraud, treat them very differently than they treat welfare fraud and are punished much more severely for the fraud than the 100 million fraud. I was trying to show how even getting that aid is constant to avoid being prosecuted for misusing the funds whereas people who enjoy the large for instance, the Federal Reserve banking window borrowing billions of dollars a month, the government doesnt do anything, no surveillance or anything in that area. Differing attitudes towards two classes of people. Host do you hear from Rolling Stone readers . Guest absolutely. I hear people on twitter, make it a point, anyone who writes hate mail or a critical letter, somebody takes the time to sit down and write me a letter i always read it. It is important to read your hate mail, not everybody does it. I dont block anybody on social media. I think often, that is one of the ways you get better, listen to your readers. Sometimes they tell you this thing you tried didnt work, wasnt funny and you have to listen to that. Host matt taibbi, is it easy or is one susceptible to being brought into groupthink when traveling on a campaign in this bubble, is there groupthink. Guest it is a social thing. To think about differences, when i was a kid, reporting, and the press they didnt go to college, the Seymour Hersh method, a job being a plumber or an electrician than it was being a doctor or a lawyer. Any affinity for politicians or the rich, they attended to have this stick it to the man attitude. It was a far less Diverse Group of people, in terms of class, they were more workingclass group of people back in the day. When you are on the campaign you see a lot of people like me who come from privileged backgrounds, to really good schools, had to be white and well off and get into this business very often because they are attracted to the idea of being near power and powerful people. They want to hang out after the speech, where the candidate you had never seen that 30 or 40 years ago to be behind the rope line, the politician was the enemy. What i have seen lately is socially the media and people covering the same thing, after campaigns are over they hang out with each other, the political strategists, they go to the same bars, on the upper west side, dont know if that is a healthy thing, it may be, may not be. Host in your book insane clown president dispatches from the 2016 circus you are very critical of the manikin. Guest the Hillary Clinton manikin video. That might have been a little gratuitous. At the time this was right after the election i wrote that and i remember looking at the manikin challenge as they called it, a bunch of people on a plane together, clintons aids and the clintons, jon bon jovi was on that as well. When you are in that environment for a long time it becomes romanticized. We are in this adventure together. It is cool we are hanging out together, celebrities in the plane, we are all friends. That congenial atmosphere. You see it in books like primary colors or movies like that where they kind of lionize the whole idea of the roving campaign. There was a disaster outside the plane and they were completely unaware of it happening. They should have been panicking instead of playing a goofy game. It is not exclusive for the clintons. I have seen that in a couple different campaigns. In the obama campaign, i noticed all the reporters had photos of themselves with barack obama and posted it, fix them on the side of the plane in the press section. I like barack obama. I voted for him but i thought that was a bad look for us. We didnt want to ask like groupies. Superficially it looked bad. I tried to get to that manikin challenge, even if we do like the people we are hanging out with, we have to pretend at least we are separate, maintain that distance because it is a bad look when we get caught, making a mistake like we made in this race and got it wrong from start to finish. Host your critical of tom friedman, the New York Times columnist. Guest i enjoyed reading tom friedman. His writing style, he is famous for mixing metaphors and some of them are so strange it is like a psychedelic experience following what he is trying to say. He compared once the iraq war to driving a car with no steering wheel. Sometimes you have to throw the wheel out that you cant drive a car with no steering wheel. He will say, the rule of holes, when you are in a hole that is too deep, in three holes you cant stop digging come you cant be in three holes at once with all these bizarre images in his writing. It was very gracious i felt sad saying negative things about him. I find his writing really interesting. Host what is the origin of the name matt taibbi . Guest it is a sicilian name of arabic origin. I am neither of those things. My father is adopted. He is filipino and hawaiian, he was adopted by a sicilian family in new york. Host matt taibbi is our guest, Rolling Stone correspondent and author. His most recent book is insane clown president dispatches from the 2016 circus. Here is what the cover looks like. Phone numbers, 2027488200, east and central time zone, 748a 201. In the mountain and pacific, tyler in marietta, georgia, you have been very patient, you are on the air, go ahead. Caller the media being complicit in terrorist attacks, the media is acting as a propaganda arm for terrorists by providing nonstop coverage of their attacks, why doesnt the media get this . They are doing it to generate more ratings but what are your thoughts on that . Guest an interesting question, hadnt thought about it in my point of view. Terrorism doesnt work, nobody sees it. On the one hand, on the other hand it would be hugely irresponsible not to cover these things at the same time. I dont know exactly what the happy medium is. There may be another way to do it that is less sensational than the way we do do it. More people die in domestic murders overwhelmingly than they do in terrorist attacks but we worry a lot more about terrorism on the news. That is a consideration. I would not say we are complicit in it but there is a way that we could do it that wouldnt amplify the effect as much. To be frank people are so scared of terrorism now that they have made some crazy political decisions as a result, dating back to 9 11 and that has to do with the constant bombardment of coverage when theres a terrorist attack so that is good point. Host when things like what happened in london, do you find yourself turning on the tv immediately . Guest i dont. I lived in moscow when terrorist attacks were routine, they were routinely bombing the city. I witnessed the subway bombing a couple times. I dont find it is something i have to glue my television to watch. It is a fact of life. It is a very complicated political dilemma, getting myself worked up about it is not helpful. Clearly there is something to the idea that scaring people is the way to get them to tune in to your network and terrorists are scary, theres a commercial motive. And unpacking that a little bit. Host i cant find which book or article it is but you have a quote saying the best story for cnn is somebody has fallen down a well and the best story for fox is somebody was pushed down the well by 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 exactly. Host next call comes from nancy in redondo beach, california. Hi, nancy. Caller hi, good morning, guys, thanks, peter, thanks for cspan. I followed you for a very long time. Time. And my question is that my senses when a journalist or a reporter is going to write a story or a book, most of the time its to kind of confirm what they already believe and they may ignore what they dont want to see or contradict what they initially believe, i wonder for you personally, has there been a time where you thought it was going to be one way and turned out to be completely different and is it possible for reporters and journalists not to be biased. I will take my answer off the air and thanks again, bye bye. Host great question. Guest thats a great question. I believe that all coverage is bias and i dont think you cando have objectivity in the way that they teach in Journalism School is kind of a myth because every decision you get editorially speaks to your point of view on things so just to take an example. Even if youre looking at the New York Times and theyre covering something in that kind of unemotional thirdpersonna voice and theyre trying to giv equal weight to different points of view, even the choice of whether the put something on the front page or in the middle, on the top of the page or at the bottom, whether to have a picture. Not a picture, whether to make the headline a scare headline, less threatening. Theyre all editorial decisions and they all speak to what your opinion on the subject is. So i think theres always bias and there are a lot of different ways to handle it. I try to be open about it when im covering something else. This is what i think about the subject. In terms of the other thing about the confirmation bias which is sort of second problem, that is a huge issue in our business because among other things now speed is such a factor and how the commercial media works. You have to be as quick as possible in generating your content and one of the ways you do that is by knowing what youre going to say beforehand, if youre going to do a story on, lets say, middleclass white suburbanites to vote for donald trump. You will go to an event and ask them leading questions that tend to confirm thesis and as soon a you get the quotes you dump them in the story and you publish it and thats not a good way to do business. I think its much better to enter into a subject in a way thats openended and that allows you the freedom to kind of go in a different direction. Ive definitely had the experience of covering a story and thinking it was going to be wasnt thing and then having it turned out to be something completely different. Ive had the experience of expecting somebody to be guilty of something when i started investigating and having a turnout that they werent and had to abandon the story. You have to have the freedom to not write too and thats an important thing and a lot of the reporters dont have the freedom. And, yeah, i think thats kind of a key thing. Unfortunately again the way the business is strictured, its really just hard to allow reporters to latitude to to kind of go where the facts lead them as opposed to just cranking out content. Host its lets hear from phyllis in brooklyn, new york. Hi, phyllis. Caller i have a question about health care, specifically the members of congress, how much is their deductible and copay, do their plans cover abortion and birth control, how old are their children on health plans, who funds their health plan . Guest thats a great question. I actually dont know the answer to that. I do know that members of congress do enjoy a federal Health Insurance program or at least they did up untilns recently, last time i covered the Health Insurance story. So, yeah, we are paying for their Health Insurance and that, of course, adds to the perversity of members of Congress Moving to take away Health Insurance from people so but i think that information is easily discoverable if you go on the internet and look for it. Host this is an email question from flor, flor. If trump were a democratic president would he be target feathered from the right . Whats your take, first of all . Guest yeah, you know, i have taken a little bit of heat for this for being skeptic on the russian story and, you know, my concern with the story first of all, im politically, im not a big fan of donald trump. You know, i certainly wouldnt shed a tear if he were impeached, but my concern about the russia story is that its been very sloppily reported. Its been reported in a way that when people to excessive. Just to give you an example the field dossier that was released, no responsible news outlet would ever touch that and when buzzfeed published that, it set a motion a set of even that is was very unfortunate because, we, you know, as reporters, we you know, we as a rule dont publish unverifiable accusations of crimes against people for the simple reason that we wouldnt want that to happen to us and so when we did this with trump with the dossier that had explosive set of allegations in it, you know, now its all over the internet and its we have millions and millions of people who sort of believe implicitly that this thing is true and its led to, you know, audience have audiences coming to news stories for the set of expectations. They already believe a certain set of facts has been confirmed when we dont know for a factcts exactly whats happened. This story, i spent months on this and this is an example of what i was just talking about, about not writing when you cant find, you know, what the truth is. Every time i try to actually get hold of something concrete with this story, i just kept coming up with deadends and suppositions and Anonymous Sources who wouldnt come up with verifiable concrete information. I worry a lot about the story. I think its it could be a disaster for our system of media if this turns out not to be true and i just worry that we are getting in over our skis with this thing. Host you said youve gotten the treatment, though, from others . Guest yeah, this is one of the things that i worry about which is when when people are emotional enough about a story that they attack somebody for theres a new term out there for people who dont believe the russia thing. Theyre called them anti, antitrumpers, right, and so what theyre acting people of is aiding and abetting donald trump ive been accused of being a russian agent among other thing because i lived in russia for a long time. But what happens when people see that happening to people like me, even though i may not worry about that criticism, other people might not and theyll think twice about saying well im not sure about this, youic know, and it silences people and thats not a positive thing. People become afraid to speak their minds and and the stories generate a momentum. Everybody knows that its easy to get hits and followers on twitter by fueling this thing and they know that the opposite will happen if they express any skepticism about this thing and thats not a positive situation. You dont want people being afraid to say what they see, you know, and the media in particular. I saw this starting to happen last year before this russia thing even took place. There was a shift and even people like jim in the New York Times that wrote about this openly, trump is such an extreme character, such a threat that we in the media have to rethink our traditional kind of objective posture towards things and star to become advocates and start to think of ourselves as a way, a force that would stop him. Rc and i think a lot of people in our business have adopted that attitude and whats dangerous about the attitude is undercuts our power institutionally in the media. The media derives its power entirely from its independence. If we are seeing as being part of the Democratic Party or part of resistance effort that aids one party over another, we completely lose legitimacy. When we are seen about something else, then we are useless to people. We dont have any real function in society. We have to be separate. Its kind of when the senate in order to help barack obama push the nominees, they got rid of their ability to filibuster nominees a couple of years ago because they wanted to, you know, end the gridlock in washington and that seemed like a grate idea to the progressives at the time, right, because it helped people get through and do their work but look what happened three years later, now the senate is too weak, the Minority Party cant filibuster trumps nominees and the senate undercut itself, it undercut its own Institutional Authority on behalf of somebody else and the media, i think, is doing that now. By signing on with the resistance effort, making ib distinguishable we lose our power and we have to be seen as being separate. Host differences or similarities with american and russian characters . Guest both countries see their citizens view themselves as power power nations and they derive incredible pride in the idea that theyre different from people who live in small countries that dont affect everything in the world, there was i remember being in the apartment of a russian teacher on the day that they dismantled the soviet map and they changed the name from the u. S. Authority to the cis, i forget what that even stands for in english but basically the old soviet map became much smaller. As if the United States became 23 states instead of 250 and he looked at the new map and he was crying because he had grown up his whole wife with 11 time zone expanse of a super power and thought of himself as part of his empire and now he wasnt anymore, you know, and i think americans and russians both share that idea that we are part of the world hierarchy. Both countries are heavily militarized, much more macho than other countries and in terms of differences, i dont know, thats a long list, you know. Americans are much more conservative i would say. I dont know. I would have to think about that, give me a little bit of time on that. Host while youre thinking about lets hear from walter in cincinnati. T wall hi, walter, go ahead with your question or comment. Caller hi, matt, i would like to have first of all, i think that youre absolutely right that the media has become a what i wanted to know is your opinion of the writing of ali who has written a book, i think its called heretic, her notion is that we will never eliminate the jihadists by trying to kill them all. What we need to do is support the notion of the islamic world having reformation similar to what the christian did back ways, getting out of the seventh century and your opinion and why that is not talked about, i dont see it on any television, nobody is talking about the idea of having the islamic world having a reformation, thanks of. 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, of course, profit in this area. Understand that companies have to make must be for providing a service but when half of the money that we spend on healthn care thats profit, that doesnt make sense to me either. Its not an area of expertise for me but clearly the american system is the most irrational and logical one in the world and i agree with you. I remember one of the one of the things i enjoyed abouthe russia is i can talk to thent e doctors equipment, they would see me and and i think thats something that this generation is growing up without this idea that health care is something that you have a right to and i think thats too bad. So, yeah, in terms of roger ailes, you know, i agree with you. Ive had a lot of people say the same things to me that they lost family members over the years because, you know, their fathers or mothers or their aunts or uncles watched television all day lock and became increasingly anger and bitter and unable to talk to their friends and relatives anymore and i think the way we consume media now and fox is a pine ear pioneer of this. Thats really a shame. When i grew up, i cant remember it mattering what a persons political opinions were and its a weird thing. Its 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. [music] host matt taibbi you list a couple of books on your favorites. He was very a funny british writer. I think his books, they have a candidlike quality to them and they really they rush from scene to scene. Theyre like a lot of british writers of that genre, sort of the oscarwild kind of theme. Green was one of my favorite writers. What i love his books are just so beautifully structured. Theyre so incredibly economical. You know, every line is typed. Theres no waste motion of any of it. It makes you think scoop which is a book that every Foreign Correspondent carries on his or her person all over the world, its a great story about a guy who has a gardening column in the british newspaper and he, by accident, gets dispatched to cover a civil war in the middle of africa. Its like all comedies. Influential person asks for somebody by that name and the editor mistakenly thinks its this gardening columnist and they send him out to this brutal place and its just hilariously funny and hes like a great model for just satire in general because this panoramic view of the Human Experience and on top of that, in terms of his craftsmanship, he was anaftsmans incredibly polished seemless kind of writer. He kind of checks all of the boxes for me. 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 discussing the utility of a thing like a trial and thats something im dealing with that involves a corporate crime, go after individual benefit recipients but not these Larger Companies that are just reaping these massive quantities of money. Im wondering if youre familiar with a case in new york that basically out in tenth year, been through appellate structure and created new law and entitled landon v. Crowe and involving criminal Justice System drug testing, are you familiar with it at all . Host all right, eric, thank you very much. Matt tiabi. Hes not with us anymore, so youre going to have to do your own research on that case, i apologize. It but you do talk and i want to say its from griftopia, you talk about the fact that its much easier to get a slam dunk conviction but not to take a case, a complex case to court that last 10, 20 years. Guest i heard this over and over again from prosecutors. Look, look ait from our point of view. We got evaluated according to how many convictions we get. So if your us, are you going to go court and they have the best lawyers in the world, its not easy to meet, or are we going to take 50 drug dealers to court and get wins on all of them and some of them we throw them in the box and we scare them and they confess whereas with these gigantic Financial Institutions, they dont admit a thing, they dig in, they have the best lawyers in the world and when when they are plainly guilty, it is extremely difficult to get convictions. T is e i mean, i covered a trial or it takes so long that, you know, sometimes can wait out the criminal Justice System and force them into mistakes because they are trying to get withinrc the statute of limitations. I covered a case that involves rigging in the Municipal Bond market and they had the guys on tape and they clearly, clearly had them but it took so long to get that case through court among other things because they had to educate the jury about all the jargon and defeat so many emotions and by the time they went to trial they ended up losing defendants because they didnt meet the tenyear statute of limitations. If youre a prosecutor, it is a difficult choice. Youre going to lose a loft a lot of the times. Symbolically you have to try because otherwise what youre saying to the people is, you know, we are giving up, right . We are going to take the money from these guys because its tog hard to take them to trial. We will take the check and we are going to put these people in jail which invalidates swrail as far as im concerned. Le in it makes it if a certain class of people can go to jail and only a certain class of people can, thats not legitimate criminal justice to me. So i think you have to tryme. Anyway. Host rob, please go ahead . Caller matt as the only combservetive quite sure, we see nationwide the left is very intolerant of disagreeableents voices. You talked about not liking the words liberal and conservative which you went to bar college, you quoted thompson, youveor an denigrated roger ailes and fox news, you used the word on servetive twice and havent used the word liberal. My comment is 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 stan matt taibbi, there was rob in connecticut. Caller i dont know where to begin. What you are really saying is you think inherently, racially, black and hispanic people are more prone to negative behavior than white people . That is what you are saying with that question. It is absurd, preposterous, you should be ashamed of yourself. If you want to come after me and say i am a liberal, uppermiddleclass white kid, you dont see a difference between me and fox news, that is fine even though i clearly regularly go after the Democratic Party in my work and never heard once fox news take on a conservative on that station as i try to look at everybody and i disagree with people of my own political character all the time because i think that is healthy. It is not a business for me. I dont do this to try to scare liberals into tuning into my articles that i can make money. This is about calling it as i see it. That is not what fox news does. I think your views, i couldnt disagree with them more strongly. I feel sorry that you feel that way. Host this is carolyn in spearfish, south dakota. How much blame should belong to the New York Times and the Washington Post who are so excoriating trump that the voters went the other way in response . I dont know about singling out those two publications but i do think that was a phenomenon that was true, when i talk about this in my book, reporters went after trump, he rose in the polls, he didnt go down. Every time he had one of those scandals like for instance after when he said i like people who arent captured, like john mccain. The conventional wisdom among the press corps is that is an on survival scandal. You can say bad things about mexicans but veterans . Come on. No politician has ever survived Something Like that and 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 he ever said it and the media went after him more and he went up higher in the polls. What we learned in that experience a we should have learned is a huge section of the public dislikes us more than they dislike donald trump and distrust us more than they trust distrust donald trump. This is why i have trouble with people who say things like the media didnt call out trump enough because we certainly did, just that we dont have any influence over a segment of the population anymore. We have to examine why that is. Why are we not listened to by people out there. Some of it is that we are not interested in the same things trump voters are interested in but we have to address it. Host from the 2009 book the great derangement a terrifying true story of war, politics, and religion matt taibbi rights washington politicians view the people as a capricious and dangerous enemy, the mob is only interesting qualities in their power to take away politicians jobs. Guest this is something i hear from people in congress, lots of stories from people who talk about how the worst job in the Senate Office or house office is the person who has to answer the constituents telephone calls as i hear stories about people who sit there and when the phone rings they hold it like this. Politicians look at the voter is a kind of haranguing nuisance, talking generally, there are exceptions i run into but for the most part politics can be conducted without a lot of interaction with the voter. You construct a policy that is your donors support, you get money from your donors in exchange for creating legislations that they like, you do commercials, put the commercials on the air, do appearances in legacy media and run elections that way and most of them are not seriously opposed anyway. If you play your cards right you basically dont have to leave washington in order to get reelected. You go home symbolically to make appearances but the way the game is played it is all about raising money and doing commercials and doing media appearances and you can do all that without really talking to people and that is a big problem with our politics. Trump differed from that, trump based his strategy on talking to people, physically interacting with people in small towns. Host this is joe, and email in new york city, trump wants to repeal the Karen Ferguson act of 1944, allowing Insurance Companies to cross state lines. You wrote about that. I remember hearing him talk about that in new hampshire. He said it in a very strange way, talked about Insurance Companies and how it didnt make sense at first but i realized he was talking about the antitrust exemption, but i havent seen any evidence that he wants to repeal the antitrust exemption enjoyed by Health Insurance companies. It could turn out to be one of these things, trump talked about a lot of things he wanted to do on the campaign trail but we are not seeing every utterance he is doing them. If he wanted to end the carried interest tax breaks for people who are in private equity, where is that proposal now. We will see. It was interesting hearing him talk about it. One of many populist things he said as a candidate that seemed to work with people. But again as president is he going to carry through on any of it . We will see. I dont know. I wrote about this the other day. A similar example was he was in favor of importing drugs from canada but we havent seen any evidence he is pushing for that either. Host same with barack obama. Guest exactly. It is a problem with american politics. Campaigns dont have a lot of connection to reality. They are just shows and people are more progressive or populist as candidates and they are once they get elected. Host what is the upside or the downside of changing the service . It would increase competition between Insurance Companies. They dont have to compete with each other. Because of the antitrust exemptions they enjoy they have little fiefdoms in each state. It was something they got early on. I guess it was a nearly 50s that they got this exemption and headed ever since. It is one of the main reasons Health Insurance prices are so high and cost of healthcare is so high. I also favor other approaches to the healthcare problem that would be less marketbased but if we are going to go marketbased solution we have to at least make it more like a free market because right now it is a big protectionist racket, the countries divvied up into little territories and they do what they want in those territories. Host from insane clown president dispatches from the 2016 circus, matt taibbis most recent book, voters in america not only they for decades has been almost totally disenfranchised subjects of one of the more brilliant chained, suppressing systems ever invented i will read that one more time. Voters in america not only arent overin power, they for decades have been almost totally disenfranchised subjects of one of the more brilliant chained suppressing systems ever invented. Guest it is what we talked about today. Voters only had two choices for the most part and both of those choices tend 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 they get to make a Political Choice. We essentially eliminate everybody who doesnt have the scent of the National News media, the political donor class and the two Major Political parties and that is a triumvirate that is closely guarded, the 8 hour, for decades in this country and yes, we get to choose between one of two parties that are acceptable to those groups but that is not a terribly wide amount of Political Choice. Interestingly, trump broke that mold. He was a true outsider in a way, he didnt need the money of the donor class to get elected and didnt use the media to get elected in a traditional way and he was an outsider to the Republican Party and didnt use their political machinery so theres a blueprint now for somebody else to get elected. Unfortunately when we finally had a real Political Choice we spent it on the wrong person but it was interesting. Host next call from linda in phoenix. Caller Great Program as always. I love talking about the great russian riders in new york and Public Schools and high school, in the course of this program, the essence has been a very bleak picture in the United States, the polarization, even and in the 60s we are in a polarized economically politically culturally, it is so disturbing for persons of my generation right now, we cant see this continuing on as it is. How can we continue as a sovereign nation with a government that is inoperable, that is growing ugly inoperable, all i can see is given the history, the divisions, strong divisions and in an electorate where one in six persons believe democracy is not important to them how can this not eventually erupt in civil unrest to the course . Host lets leave it there and hear from matt taibbi. Guest i agree with you, i am distressed about the same things. We are in an age of polarization that is going in a direction that is unsustainable. I remember way back when i was writing the great derangement a terrifying true story of war, politics, and religion or even before that, i did a story where i was undercover, working in the Bush Campaign in 2004 and i remember listening to people, this was just about republicans but the thing that was interesting to me is they didnt have a vision of the country that included the sort of liberals was all they wanted there idea was a sort of fantasy conception of the perfect america was a world where these liberal professors and actors from hollywood and media figures just didnt exist anymore. They didnt want to get along with them, they just wanted them kind of outoftheway. I thought that is such a negative vision of the country, we have to have a vision where everybody finds 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 his come up in the last year or so where it is not if you are democrat sometimes it is not about here is what we stand for positively, the biggest thing they are about is being against republicans and they dont have a vision of the country that includes republicans. I understand their frustrations, people are angry, they believe the republicans made a racist choice, they are misogynists, but we have to live together ultimately, all of us. There has to be somebody has to come up with a way for us to talk to each other again. I dont know what that is but that is the magic formula Going Forward. We have to have a national reconciliation. I hope it is sooner rather than later. Host from insane clown president dispatches from the 2016 circus, matt taibbi writes politics used to be simple and protectable, every four years of money men in dc would throw their weight behind whatever half right front of the candidate prove most adept at snowing the population into buying a warmed over version of the same crappy policies they always bought. Did 2016 change that . Guest i think it did. Host for the future too . Guest what happened with trump and to a lesser extent sanders upset the apple cart maybe forever because the formula has changed now. In the old days in order to win, in order to get the white house as opposed to just being interesting and a factor like ross perot, you needed the Institutional Support of the party, the money and the press. Now, what trump and sanders both showed us the voting public has a way of thinking for itself now. And institutional bureaucratic structure. And who is going to be the salesman. It is a bit of an open season. Anybody can win but in the case of trump it turned out to be a negative, it opened up a range of possibilities. Host how long did it take you to learn that . Guest i dont know. I write fairly quickly i guess. I obsess. I read philip ross once, something about the way he writes, he writes 500 words a day. I may be missing who this is about but the whole point is they would get the sense ahead of time and commit it to paper and handwritten, i put text down quickly and go back and play with it, smaller and tighter, everybody does a different way. Host teen campaigns needed people is only props, matt taibbi writes. Candidate wanted to show he or she was with them 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 he would visit a robotics factory in wisconsin and be photographed wearing a hard hat and goggles and so on. Guest this is the same thing i was talking about before, dont really need people to be a politician. You need people to be props for photo ops. To have their support, they mastered a way of winning elections that did not necessarily involve active participation of voters, they were able to do it through money, stagecraft, production values, all that stuff allowed them to bypass the oldschool version of politics where they had to go to the union halls, whatever it was, convince people, it is not done that way and trump pioneered a more interesting way of running politics, didnt have a campaign but a human being with overheated ganglia behind his eyes appearing on television, but that the entire media system be his campaign structure, didnt need staff let alone people, that was interesting too. Host sometimes his speeches would be all risk. Guest almost all entirely risk. I talk to my first boss in journalism, the late Wayne Barrett who was an Investigative Reporter at the village voice, he died earlier this year but he was one of trumps first biographers. I talked to wayne, one of the things he told me was donald trump had never in his life read a prepared text until his father died. He read something at his funeral. I watched out for that. What you see on the campaign trail with trump, go to a place, his campaign would distribute a flyer that has prepared remarks on it and the first line would Say Something like so great to be back in manchester, the second line was all he is constitutionally incapable of sticking to script although he did do it for a brief period after steve bannon got hired which i thought was interesting, that period changed his campaign when he did this bizarre thing about reaching out to the africanamerican voter and he actually read those speeches, he was almost like a prisoner of war reading, but for the most part, i think he doesnt know what he is going to say most of the time. Host next call from matt taibbi comes from elizabeth in san marcus, california. Go ahead, we are listening. I love your work, matt. I want to mention obama never really gets credit for landing the plane after the economy headed off the cliff. Then the plane landed on the oceans, everybody got into the lifeboats and republicans refused to row. With that as a backdrop, it really affected obamas ability to get a lot of things accomplished like singlepayer given the Healthcare System is one fifth the economy of the time. To eliminate those at that point would have been catastrophic. I want to jump in on your media thing and ask a question. I dont think trump, number one, we have a shattered media environment. Everyone is chasing around the tweets. Big issues are not getting addressed. Everyone is running off to talk about some insane covfefe or whatever, democracy demands it is boring, tried to get 100 people in a room to agree on anything and that is what the system is built on. Would you agree in a media environment today, trump didnt do it alone. Drivetime radio is all conservative other than npr. Fox news is showing an alternate universe from what you see on cnn. The ideas that cnn and msnbc created trump, i dont necessarily by that. Given the number of men that have jobs in this country today, that is who is driving around in the middle of the country, they are listening to Rush Limbaugh and laura ingram. So many conservative talkers, and there are no, very few liberal talkers. Could you comment on that a little bit . Host elizabeth in san marcos. Guest to talk about the first thing. Barack obama and his response the financial crisis, i remember talking to people on wall street before Obama Took Office during the transition into thousand 8, the economy is in full meltdown mode and they were still in the process of constructing a bailout and a bailouts were completely bipartisan, what obama and Timothy Guyton did with the same thing george w. Bush and hank paulson started while the commodity began to take in december. I remember talking to people on wall street and not everybody some people had this view, looking forward to barack obama coming into office, somebody who has incredible communication skills, to get in front of the country and explain what happened with a subprime mortgage crisis which is an incredibly involved, complicated fraud that was perpetrated on the markets and to disproportionately targeted people of color and lower income individuals, a massive foreclosure crisis, obama didnt do that. Obama did not address the root cause of the crisis in his response to it, he did it he continued a policy the republicans started which was to 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 left in place that laid the groundwork for future problems in the market. I understand he inherited unprecedented problems, but at least in the area of the stuff i covered, he was disappointing at least on that level, he was someone who could have started out, something that was a very difficult topic for the public and he declined to do it. A chance to talk about it on 60 minutes, one of the few things he said was some of the least ethical behavior on wall street wasnt illegal. Which is really lawyering. It is true but that doesnt mean other bad behavior on wall street wasnt illegal. It just means some of it wasnt illegal. He was trying to split the baby and away with that issue. That was disappointing to me. On the other issue of trump not doing it alone, the other thing i would say to that is, driving afternoon radio and fox and the daily caller have always been there. Barack obama overcame them, won the election by 10 million votes in 2008. I dont think the landscape is not an insuperable obstacle to a skilled politician. What happened with the trump phenomenon was a perfect storm of a disaffected public, a candidate who is uniquely suited to take advantage of the reality show format of the Campaign Coverage and a democratic candidate in disarray. That fed into a lot of the rhetoric trump was laying out. He had all of that, other politicians failed. Host back to insane clown president dispatches from the 2016 circus. Some supporters of people who are tired of being told they have to be part of some coalition in order to have a political voice, they particularly hate being lectured about alienating minorities especially by members of their own party. Guest this is something oddly enough the david from talk to in an article for the atlantic. After mitt romney lost in 2012 the republicans looked at the results and said if we did a little better, with hispanics, we would have won that election. We start casting about for a candidate that has a foster message on immigration, and that is why the bush ended up with 100 million, the campaign effort, early on in that race, the republican electorate is in a different place. That is not where they wanted to go. They didnt want to be more Inclusive Party or more openminded or welcome more people to the tent. They wanted what donald trump was selling which was something very different. He wanted to close the borders and send everybody back. The party was at out of touch with its own electorate. They were probably right in terms of where the party should have gone but it was a different matter to convince people to go there. Host this is booktv on cspan2, matt taibbi is our in depth author and guest this month. From great barrington, massachusetts. Caller how are you doing . Host it is matt taibbi. If i said mike, i apologize. Caller not a problem. I really appreciate the way you can slog through really 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 so many insane things is biology. There was a doctor harm or in the early 80s who proved that because of all disease, and mental disease, is caused by shock to the system. This is all empirically proven. Like ed snowden living in norway, they wont let him out at all. I was wondering, you seem like a person who can slog through russian and financial stuff and get to the bottom of it but no one brings up biology, the we are animals doing all of this. Host we are going to leave it there in massachusetts. Matt taibbi in new york, any response . Guest i dont know that doctors work so i dont think i could comment on it. Im not against doing medical stories but that sounds like a big one to try to tackle. Host you dont need to comment if you dont once to. This is an email from marcellas. Why is saki, hh monroe, one of your favorite writers . Why did he leave intercept online website . Guest i will answer the second question first. I start a publication or website [called] which is part of the first look at the media empire, it didnt work out, had disagreements with management and unfortunately the project never got off the ground. We had a lot of talented, cool people, we were trying to recreate spy magazine. We wanted to do Something Like that, it didnt work out. The 19 was a money issue . Guest it was complicated, kind of an interpersonal thing. A clash of philosophies. I may not be the best boss in the world, i think it didnt work out but too bad. Really good people for the most part. In terms of sake, sake is not very well known to american audiences. A writer named hector you monroe is a little bit like a little bit similar in style. Sake was much darker, blacker sense of humor. His mother was trampled to death by a cow so he wrote a lot of short stories considered famous for having there was a terrible animal in the story and people were getting torn apart bible cats and things like that but he had a nasty dark view of the uppercrust british aristocrats in the last phase of the British Empire and he was a brilliant wordsmith, very screwed up person personally. He wrote these gorgeous, incredibly funny stories, some of my favorites growing up, i actually named my second son, his middle name is monroe after sake. I strongly advise anybody who never read sake to do so because they are really short, you can read them in half an hour. There brilliant and funny and too bad he is not better known. Host have you had any interaction with the Trump White House . Guest i have. I 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 for my own curiosity i tried to figure out a lot of things, a lot of people in congress, in the white house too. To make sense of it, i dont have anything i can contribute. Host Eric Levinson tweets on russia, two stories, did russia interfere in the election, did trump collude . That is what i dont conflate. I said from the beginning, if you look back i will see this, the first stories i wrote about this i wouldnt be surprised at all this russia was responsible for the hack of the dnc. Later, when donald trump himself, probably russia, i wrote about that too, i dont conflate those things. I think the problem is people do conflate some. My issue with the story is lets say that is true. That doesnt necessarily follow that trump and the russians colluded to do this. If you think about it from a logical deck of view, no evidence the russians even involved trump in that caper. If they wanted to. That is the problem that i have. People think when i say i dont the proof of collusion, im not saying nothing happened. I am saying if you want to call someone a traitor who has committed espionage against the United States you need something more solid. That is where i am with that. James in denham springs, louisiana. Whenever i read your Rolling Stone articles about politicians and their misconduct i get so mad i have to put down the magazine and get a drink, take a walk around the block. Do you get just as mad when you are writing about them and their shenanigans . Guest sometimes. Writing about it is the way to exercise that a little bit. Part of the job is to get upset. You try to find ways to respond to something horrible. If you are not getting upset, you know something is going on and you are doing it for too long. Host phil, portland, oregon, if you moment left with our guest, matt taibbi. We 15 thank you, cspan and hello, matt. A quick comment before my question. The political system is quite sustainable as long as profits in Political Office continues. The 90 answer to this profit from the office, term limits. My question. You write about wall street grabbing of pensions. Does that involve public and private and can it be stopped, can they be controlled and is their too much risk to the public and private pensions . I will take my answer off the air, thank you. Guest i wrote a lot about that in the last eight years and a couple different levels, one is the question of who is managing public Pension Funds and that is a separate issue. There is a question of are we paying exorbitant fees for hedge funds that dont perform terribly well to manage our money. I talked to somebody who managed the pension fund in illinois, the Public Pension Fund and says i am paying a few pennies for workers money in this gigantic index fund. And pays tens of millions of dollars to manage. Why would i bother . Over a long time, all Pension Funds are longterm investments. Index funds will do fine for the most part. The issue that is pertinent to the stuff i did, the fact that these gigantic Financial Companies were selling Properties Like subprime mortgage instruments, they very often targeted these Institutional Investors like Pension Funds because what they would do is take some state employee that manages these funds and might make 75,000 or 100,000, go to the super bowl and hang out with them for a week and next thing you know that person is buying 20 million worth of product and what happened in the financial crisis, we saw losses of 25, 35 across the board. They were buying huge masses of essentially worthless subprime mortgage instruments. It was a snake oil game, the same thing as people calling up your grandparents and offering them overpriced magazine subscriptions. You know you have a vulnerable buyer and you sell as much as you can of worthless products. That is what happened in the financial crisis. It is so disturbing and so predatory and sociopathic, but not terribly well explained to the public. That is what i was trying to get at. Host matt taibbi, if somebody wanted to pick up one of your books which one would you recommend . Guest right now probably the divide american injustice in the age of the wealth gap, that is the one i am happiest about. Host came out in 2014. Guest i spent a lot of time reporting on that book. It is the most elaborate of the books i have written but another one coming out later this year that i am excited about, the eric garner case in new york. I am looking forward to seeing how that one comes out. Host the divide american injustice in the age of the wealth gap, income inequality, incarceration inequality are the main topics. Guest i had been covering whitecollar crime for a long time and after a period of time, i kept running up against this issue of these guys are doing incredible scams, ripping off enormous sums of money and some of them are brilliant, amazing in their complexity but they are not doing any time. Even when they get caught they dont get punished for it. In order to try to bring out for readers how outrageous and ridiculous that was i have to understand how easy it was for other people to go to jail and that is something i didnt know about. The divide is exploration. I go to various places and talk to people who have been imprisoned and how they got to jail and how easy it is what ordinary person to end up with a record. It is elaborate and instructive and nobody end as having to pay a single sent or do a day in jail, a store you cant tell unless it is compare and contrast exercise so that is what this is, this fast exercise showing the two different systems. Host lee in rockville, maryland, your on booktv. Caller good afternoon, really great show today. I used to enjoy hearing you on imus in the morning, but that is not on anymore. You really had some good banter with him. Lot of good banter with him. You and i are old enough to remember when the communist threat was known as the red menace and the godless commies, things like that. When the cold war was going on. But now the country called russia is run by a kgb thug by the name of Vladimir Putin and he is cut out of the same path. They still murder people, they still do terrible things, support the genocidal regime, and they are not the evil empire that reagan used to call them, and singing the praises of the russians, a National Security advisor, this is outrageous, absolutely outrageous. I dont get it. Host do you want to ask another question . Caller that is it. Guest i was in russia when Vladimir Putin became president , long, long features about what happened back then. I knew where it came from, reporters subsequently disappeared, people who are dead today. Because they didnt get along with the putin regime. The iniquity of Vladimir Putins russia, i am totally aware of that. It is a little bit of a stretch to say that, four years ago when barack obama was debating mitt romney on television and mitt romney said russia was the biggest threat facing the world, barack obama said they want their foreignpolicy back and suggested russia is what it is but it is better for us to get along in some ways and not be completely hostile enemies. To go back to what it was in the past. There is some merit to that. Two nuclear powers, what happened in syria was an incredibly dangerous thing, when trump was lobbing missiles into syria and there were Russian Forces on the ground, that is a very tense situation. That is what i worry about most of all with the Trump Administration, nuclear war and russia is what it is. You dont have to agree with it. I dont like the regime there but we are better off not in a constant state of hostility with russia and we are. If you ask russia what their view of americans is, they will have the same things to say about us, if you think of the 1996 election i was there for in russia, we meddled in that, Boris Yeltsins campaign, look at Time Magazine in july 1996 a picture of Boris Yeltsin and a headline, yanks to the rescue because we openly bragged about helping win reelection and the russians it is a third world regime, they abuse journalist and crackdown on all kinds of freedoms and support regimes, that is who they are. We are better off not at war then at war with them. Host tyler in east lansing, michigan, home of Michigan State emails and i was pleased to see you discussing the righteous mind. In that spirit, what do you see as conservatives best point and their biggest shortcoming . Guest the best point of conservatives . Host yes and their biggest shortcoming. Or a shortcoming of that is easier. Host there is a complaint out there in conservative america that the liberal mind and liberal media has become more orthodox and unaccepting of ideas. And more hostile. I dont know if that is true or not, but from their point of view from conservatives point of view what they say liberals run hollywood, they run the media, they run campuses and we see our world being taken over and that is why we are so angry and i am not sure that it is a completely invalid point of view. There is some truth to the fact that the conservative point of view is often excluded automatically. Do i agree with it . No. I think it does happen. In terms of their weakest point of view take the caller before who was talking about black and hispanic people are the root of all evil, that kind of talk has become increasingly normalized, especially the kind of fringe conservative media and stuff you see on a lot of those sites is scary to me. Host a couple facebook comments. This is harley, enjoy you on imus. Would like to know if you think trump can really make a difference in fighting global terror including recent stuff going on . Guest no. I think trump is uniquely 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 the different relationships and historical grievances in the region, in the middle east. Someone who knows the difference between egypt and yemen and in between the shiites and sunnis and donald trump doesnt know the difference between any of that. It is one big area that needs to be bombed to him. That is a failing of American Foreign policy come our unwillingness to learn about what is going on in that part of the world. It was a problem when we invaded iraq. We have this incredibly simplistic idea that we were going to go in there and the tanks were going to roll in and it was going to be switzerland six weeks later, this great flowering of western values was going to take place. We did that because we had no idea who these people were, we werent interested in their point of view, didnt care about their history, their culture, nothing. There are problems over there but we are not going to solve them by shaking our fist and dropping bombs. Host Joseph Oppenheimer post on facebook, the world is the most peaceful, prosperous, healthy, etc. This coincided with the growth of capitalism, think tanks, multinational companies, etc. Arent you naive to think the little guy is being screwed . Guest why dont you ask the little guy to eye with the incomes in this country have been declining steadily since 1970. Any quality has grown at an enormous rate. The top 1 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. If you look at overall, at the level of wealth in places like china you might see a better standard of living but in other parts of the world, other phenomena are entirely negative like the growth of any quality, the collapse of sovereign nations in third world places, in africa, we see less order in the world in the last 30 or 40 years. I understand global capitalism has resulted in a lot of progress but there are issues too. Those underline a lot of political grievances going on. Host sean in hawaii, one minute left. Caller cosmopolitan, state of the union. Do you ever watch your favorite hawaiian and filipino and because you are a Rolling Stone writer what is your favorite album or band . I like Hollow Hollow out of filipino food, a crazy ice cream kind of thing. Dont know how to explain it. My wife is filipino so we eat a little bit of that food at home every now and then. Hawaiian food i have only been to hawaii once, i never met my relatives there. Im ignorant im too embarrassed to share with people on the air. That is why they keep me away from Rolling Stone. Does involve disco or the bee gees . Guest i like rap music am i like everything. Host have you noticed your books over the years, this came out in mid august, smells like dead elephants, your name is down at the bottom. Then this year, your name is great big letters we have you noticed that . Your name is growing . Guest i havent thought of that but that is cool. Host for the last three hours matt taibbi has been our guest on booktvs in depth program. Here is a list of his books beginning with the exile which came out in 2000 about sex, drugs and libel in the new russia. Spanking the donkeys, dispatches from the 2004 election. Smells like dead elephants, dispatches from a rotting empire came out in 2007, the great derangement a terrifying true story of war, politics, and religion came out in 2009, griftopia bubble machines, vampire squids, and the long con that is breaking america, 2011, the divide which matt taibbi recommends as the book to pick up. The divide american injustice in the age of the wealth gap came out in 2014 at his most recent book this year, insane clown president dispatches from the 2016 circus. Matt taibbi, thank you for your time on booktv. Cspan, where history unfolds daily. In 1979, cspan was created as a Public Service by American Cable Television companies and is brought to you today by your cable or satellite provider. This weekend we are alive at the Chicago Tribune annual book fest book fair. We thought we would look at the most popular Nonfiction Books according to Chicago Public library. Topping the list is jd vance with the rust belt town in hawaii. Followed by animal, vegetable miracle about a family of attempt to be locally grown food. After that the late neurosurgeons autobiography about his battle with stage 4 lung cancer when pressed becomes air. Next on the list is daily show host travel noahs memoir of growing up in apartheid era south africa, born a crime. Followed by the undoing project by Michael Lewis detailing the nobel prizewinning work of two israeli psychologist. Look at the most popular Nonfiction Book according to Chicago Public library continues with a lifechanging magic of tidying up by mary condo. After that, they look at the future of humanity in homo davis. Next, National Book awardwinning author coatss thoughts on the current state of black america in between the world and me. Is followed by the southside by chicago native natalie more who weighs in on segregation in the city. Wrapping up our look at the most popular Nonfiction Books according to the chicago book library is a report on the political right, strangers in their own land. Many of these authors have or will be appearing on booktv. You can watch them on our website, booktv. Org. Booktv is live today from chicago for the printers rowlett fest annual event featuring several author discussions ins held in the printers row neighborhood just south. Our live coverage this weekend comes from Jones College prep ice school, you will hear from many others including National Book award winner, professor and pastor mike dyson, lisa neville he, heather thompson, former congressman trey rachel and many more. We will hear from arthur Mary Dearborn lose her book is a biography of ernest hemingway. This is live coverage of the 33rd annual Chicago Tribune it fest on booktv on cspan2. Good morning and welcome to the 33rd annual Chicago Tribune printers rowlett fest. I would like to start by giving a special thank u