On Monday, The Hill’s excellent “Rising” show featuring hosts Robby Soave and Briahna Joy Gray featured a segment about controversial comments I made on Substack Notes last week. Briahna, with whom I’ve always gotten along, made a series of statements I believed should be corrected. I wrote, hoping this would be dealt with quietly via corrections, but it didn’t work out, and instead they were good enough to have me on for the above segment today. Things got hot.

I’d counted at least six issues with the Monday show. For instance, Briahna described reading a recent tweet of mine, in which I posted one of Elon Musk’s texts about shadowbanning me. Appearing genuinely moved to anger that I’d held my tongue about Elon for so long, she exclaimed:

So this is a contemporary instance where Taibbi has evidence that [Musk] is censoring a major reporter like Matt Taibbi, and he declined… for a year, almost a year, to actually tell the public of this!

But as Racket readers know, I announced all this as it was happening last year, relaying the quote about a “blanket search ban” and explaining “all of my Twitter Files threads had been disabled.” I know Brie read that “Meet the Censored: Me?” piece, because she referenced it in a critical way on another Rising segment a year ago. So that’s odd! She added I had “to date, still not really criticized” Elon (I’ve done so regularly), then claimed that “by the way, there weren’t more Twitter Files” to be had at the time I was cut off by Musk, because “as I understand it,” the documents came from “one cache” all the Twitter Files reporters got, presumably at an early juncture.

But there wasn’t one cache, but dozens, collected at different times via different search methodologies, and I was still waiting for results the day things fell apart. This last claim had particular sting because it implied I was keeping mum about Elon’s peccadilloes for a story I wasn’t even getting anymore. No one’s ever said anything about there only being one batch of files, that’s not in any reporting anywhere. I didn’t know the project was over until Elon went on Spaces and said the story was “done, there’s not much left really… we need to move on.” Again, Brie had to know this, because that Rising segment last year contained clips of me publicly urging Elon to continue the project with another reporters. So, how? There was no answer when I asked.

All this was delivered in a prosecutorial manner, with Brie talking once and again about what I’d “admitted” and “acknowledged,” like I’d confessed something. Summarizing these admissions, she wondered: “Maybe there’s something other than trying to preserve his relationship with Elon for the sake of journalism.”

Yikes. In fact there is — it’s a bad business generally to go after sources in public no matter how they behave, because it makes other potential sources nervous about opening up to you — but that’s obviously not what she meant.

The plot twist is that all of this got complicated anew today:

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