Afroman turns police raid into a win: ‘Blessing in disguise’ after free speech victory



Last month, American rapper Afroman (real name Joseph Edgar Foreman) won a defamation lawsuit against Ohio sheriff’s deputies who raided his home in 2022. Acting on a tip about drugs and kidnapping, the deputies kicked down his door with guns drawn, ransacked the house, and seized some cash — all captured on his home security cameras.

No drugs or evidence was found, and no charges were filed. Afroman then turned the raid footage into viral parody videos, including the hit “Lemon Pound Cake,” which prompted the deputies to sue him for defamation. On March 18, an Ohio jury ruled in his favor on the grounds of free speech.

Now he joins Matt Kibbe, BlazeTV host of “Kibbe on Liberty” to discuss the raid, the lawsuit, and what the victory means for free speech in America.

Afroman, who’s currently on tour, says that the incident with the Ohio deputies has turned out to be “a blessing in disguise,” as people have been showing their support like never before.

“We got way more people than I usually have, and man, you can feel it. I’'s something new in the air. Man, I’m back like Tina Turner after ‘What’s Love Got to Do With It,’” he laughed.

But before the victory, life was feeling dark, he admits.

“You start questioning your manhood when people come to where your family live and they kick the place in. ... It’s outrageous for people to come to your house and tear it up — especially when they got all their information wrong,” he tells Kibbe.

Even after the cops found nothing in Afroman’s home, the arrogance and ill will they carried into the raid lingered throughout the lawsuit, he recounted. “They were unapologetic and sarcastic and kind of delighting in the fact that they did vandalize my property.”

The trial, he says, was “set up in the police officers’ favor.”

“They dismissed my claims before I even went to court, so I was just in court to discuss how much money I was going to pay, you know, the vandals and thieves,” he recounts, adding that the warrant used to access his home had many “flaws,” but the court refused to address it.

However, Afroman nonetheless won the case. The jury ruled that his videos, which he says he made to help “pay for the damages” caused by the deputies, were protected under his free speech rights.

“Ultimately, in a nutshell, the police officers lost the case, and freedom of speech prevails in America,” he says triumphantly.

But freedom of speech wasn’t the end of Afroman’s victory. The lawsuit ended up drawing unprecedented attention to his album and music videos.

“[Those cops] did more for my social media in three days than I could do for myself in 15 years,” he says, noting that he gained “800,000 followers” in a matter of days because of the lawsuit.

But the biggest victory remains the protection of the First Amendment.

“Some countries, you can’t say nothing. You got to shut up. You can’t speak out against the government. ... But one of the beautiful things about America is, you know, you can speak,” he says.

“So, thank God I have it, and it’s the one thing that brought me justice.”

To hear the full interview, watch the video above.

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To enjoy more of Matt's liberty-defending stance as he gets in the face of the fake news establishment, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

BlazeTV COVID docuseries ‘The Coverup’ ends with a bang: The lab-leak evidence they tried to bury forever



Even though the COVID-19 pandemic is quickly fading into a distant memory for many Americans, BlazeTV host Matt Kibbe refuses to let the unanswered questions from that corrupt era fade into obscurity. His docuseries “The Coverup” is both a deep dive into COVID fraud and lies and a demand for accountability.

In episodes 1-5, Kibbe teamed up with a number of experts and whistleblowers — Stanford professor of medicine and current NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.), former coronavirus task force adviser Scott Atlas, molecular biologist Dr. Richard Ebright, and Twitter Files journalist Matt Taibbi. Together, they exposed the gamut of COVID-era scandals, including widespread censorship, risky gain-of-function research, suspicious behind-the-scenes White House dynamics, Anthony Fauci’s smoking-gun history of funding dangerous virus experiments, and the network of health bureaucracies that together formed a pandemic industrial complex.

The series now arrives at its sixth and final installment: “The Separation of Science from State.”

It stares at one of the most consequential unanswered questions of our time: What is the true origin of the virus — and why has it been so difficult to nail down the answer?

In this episode, Kibbe partners with science writer and former House of Lords member Matt Ridley. A longtime advocate for scientific innovation and institutional trust, Ridley initially dismissed the lab-leak theory, but after weighing the mounting evidence — from genetic anomalies in the virus to inconsistencies in early reporting — he arrived at a conclusion that shocked him: “This isn't a conspiracy theory. This is a conspiracy.”

Episode 6 explores how the “natural origin” narrative became gospel — and why it was so aggressively protected.

The evidence paints a far more complex picture. From genetic anomalies and a bat virus with a suspicious name change to sick mine workers whose samples ended up in a Wuhan lab and the flow of U.S. dollars into risky gain-of-function research, the narrative the world was told to accept and never question starts to unravel in surprising ways.

Together, Kibbe and Ridley pull back the curtain on how one story took over, how inconvenient questions were silenced, and how everyday researchers refused to let the truth stay buried.

Episode 6 of “The Coverup” is available now on BlazeTV. If you’re not already a subscriber, join the BlazeTV family today. Use code LABLEAK to get $40 off your subscription.

Thomas Massie’s viral Epstein poll reveals stunning top belief: He lives



Conspiracy theories continue to swirl around Jeffery Epstein’s controversial death. Many are unwilling to accept the FBI’s official ruling that the convicted sex offender committed suicide in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City on August 10, 2019.

The most widespread theory is that Epstein, believed by many to be a keeper of dark secrets, was murdered.

Now, however, another conspiracy theory is ramping up. In the wake of the Department of Justice’s publication last month of over 3 million additional pages, 2,000 videos, and 180,000 images from the Jeffrey Epstein files — some of which provided more insight into the event of his death — a new wave of online speculation has surged.

According to this hypothesis, which is fueled by unsubstantiated viral claims and AI-doctored photos on social media, Epstein is alive and well and living in Israel.

To gauge how many people were entertaining this theory, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) conducted his own experiment by posting a poll on X inviting users to vote on which Epstein outcome they believe is true. The responses, of which there were nearly 150,000, were telling:

During a recent interview with Massie, Matt Kibbe, BlazeTV host of “Kibbe on Liberty,” asked the Kentucky congressman to share his thoughts on the poll’s results.

“Three percent of the 147,000 people who took this poll think Jeffrey Epstein killed himself,” Massie says.

“Forty-some percent said that he’s still alive, and 30-some percent say that he’s dead, but he was murdered,” he adds, calling these numbers “surprising.”

Massie notes that he included the fourth option — “just show the results” — because some people fear that “Mossad might be watching the traffic on that poll.”

The ultimate question, he says, is: “Is [Epstein] the kind of guy who thought he was cornered and there was no way out?”

“I don't think so,” Massie says. “Like, Jeffrey Epstein, to me, seemed like the kind of guy who was just waiting for them to come and unlock the key and take him back to one of his mansions.”

“He knew, just like with the first conviction, he just would have to wait for a while and play his cards right, and I think he was that arrogant,” he adds. “That kind of arrogance is built because you got away with it before, and then you got away with it a thousand times, and you got so much dirt. He’s probably thinking, ‘If I can get back to my hard drive, this is all over with.’”

Kibbe wonders if perhaps Epstein was secreted away, not necessarily because of the “dirt” he had on others, but rather because he was “indispensable.”

“He was the guy that fixed problems for this elite class of financiers and politicians,” he says.

Massie acknowledges this possibility, recalling Epstein’s advice to former Prime Minister of Israel Ehud Barak: “Think of all the people who owe you something, and then start from there.”

“Those were his words to Ehud Barak. That’s what he had to be thinking in the jail cell,” he says.

While Massie initially thought the FBI’s suicide conclusion was “reasonable and plausible,” now that the released files show “the full color of who he was and the kinds of things he did and what he got away with,” he rejects that ruling.

“I’m not in that 3%,” he says.

To hear more, watch the video above.

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To enjoy more of Matt's liberty-defending stance as he gets in the face of the fake news establishment, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

Epstein files shine light on power networks: Revisit BlazeTV's 'The Coverup' on the same corruption web



On January 30, the U.S. Department of Justice dropped over 3 million pages of Epstein-related documents, as mandated by the Epstein Files Transparency Act, signed into law by President Trump in November 2025. This massive data dump includes roughly 2,000 videos and 180,000 images.

These revelations seem to confirm what independent voices like Glenn Beck and Matt Kibbe have warned about for years: a shadowy cabal of insiders wield tremendous power to shape how we think.

As the dust settles around this 2026 bombshell, it's the perfect time to revisit BlazeTV’s docuseries "The Coverup” — Matt Kibbe’s deep dive into a similar web of corruption: the COVID-19 pandemic.

Months before this latest Epstein file dump, Glenn Beck sat down with Kibbe to dissect the insidious links between COVID mandates, Russiagate hoaxes, and censorship to pinpoint the very same shadowy forces now spotlighted in the Epstein files.

“The same people and the same machine that weaponized the Russiagate story and covered up the Hunter Biden laptop story are the same people in the [COVID-19] apparatus,” Kibbe told Glenn.

With the Epstein files shining new light on long-hidden networks of power and influence, now is the time to watch BlazeTV’s "The Coverup" series. Go to faucicoverup.com to access the full series.

Want more from Glenn Beck?

To enjoy more of Glenn’s masterful storytelling, thought-provoking analysis, and uncanny ability to make sense of the chaos, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

Massie: FBI threatened his staff if he didn’t ‘play ball’ over pipe-bomb investigation



Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) said an FBI official threatened to open a criminal investigation on one of his staff over his persistent investigation and questioning on the Jan. 6 pipe bombs.

An FBI official threatened to open a criminal investigation on one of Massie’s staff “if we didn’t straighten up [and] play ball,” Massie told Blaze News investigative reporter Steve Baker in an interview broadcast on Matt Kibbe’s “Free the People” podcast and posted to X.

‘Even he understood that was not a good look. Probably illegal.’

“I’m going to say this here on camera because it’s important. ... He said ... ‘We’re going to investigate one of your staff for fraud,’” Massie quoted the unnamed FBI official as saying. “And he told another one of my staff this: ‘If you guys don’t straighten up, you know, if you want to play hardball, if this is how you want to play it’ or something like that, ‘this member of your staff is going to get criminally investigated for fraud’ — a very specific threat.”

Massie declined to identify the official he says levied the threat, but said he did complain about it to FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino.

“I told Bongino, I said, ‘One of your guys is threatening my guys with an FBI investigation if we don’t do what you want.’ And he [Bongino] said, ‘I’ll take care of that.’ ’Cause even he understood that was not a good look. Probably illegal.”

Massie said he later received a “non-apology” text from the official that said, “‘I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings.’”

“He didn’t apologize. He was unrepentant, let's say, really.”

Massie has been the most aggressive member of Congress investigating the pipe bombs found behind the Capitol Hill Club at 12:43 p.m. on Jan. 6 and under a park bench on the southwest side of the Democratic National Committee building 22 minutes later. In the same interview with Baker, Massie also disclosed that recent Blaze News reporting has caused him to be “99% certain” that some U.S. Capitol Police officials had a role in the planting of the pipe bombs found on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6, 2021.

“I went from 90% certain that some Capitol Police were involved in the Jan. 6 pipe bomb to 95% certain, and now I'm at 99% certain after this new story that you put out this week,” Massie told Baker.

“I’m doing this on probability. The probability may even be higher than that.”

His comments reflect Blaze News’ recent reporting on a former Capitol Police officer who was an apparent forensic match to the bomb suspect, follow-up reporting on the manner in which the second device was discovered by plainclothes Capitol Police officers, and the stonewalling the congressman charges that he faced from Capitol Police in the course of his own investigation. Assistant Police Chief Ashan Benedict, whom Massie named as having specifically blocked his investigation, retired last week.

The Kentucky Republican also expressed frustration that FBI Director Kash Patel seems to have made little more progress than his predecessor, Director Christopher Wray. In an interview with Fox News earlier this month, as well as a follow-up with independent reporter Catherine Herridge, Patel promised that major developments are incoming, but was scant on details.

A CBS story published Tuesday cited three unidentified sources stating that the FBI had cleared the police officer who appeared to match a forensic gait analysis of the bomber, citing “an alibi: video of her playing with her puppies at the time the devices were placed.” Blaze News has sought to obtain independent confirmation of the FBI’s clearance based on the alibi.

Blaze News reported Nov. 8 on a forensic match to a former Capitol Police officer, based on a computer analysis of the hoodie-wearing alleged pipe bomber’s manner of walking compared to that of the person. The algorithm rated the person as a 94% match, while the intelligence analyst who ran the study for Blaze News put the match closer to 98%. The person has since denied any allegations, through her attorney.

FBI photos

Blaze News reported Nov. 18 that two Capitol Police counter-surveillance special agents sent out to look for more explosives after the discovery of the Capitol Hill Club device were seen on video going to the DNC building and to a nearby bush on the side of the Congressional Black Caucus Institute building.

Independent video investigator Armitas discovered that the hoodie-wearing suspect identified in 2021 as the pipe bomber stopped at the bush along a sidewalk on the north side of the CBCI building at 7:47 p.m. Jan. 5. The suspect sat cross-legged at the shrub and appeared to rummage through a backpack before leaning into the bush as if attempting to place something underneath.

The bomb suspect then stood up and walked back to the DNC bench, where a pipe bomb was placed at 7:54 p.m., according to choppy video released by the FBI.

‘He had a handler, who would often interrupt and answer questions for him.’

When Capitol Police dispatch warned of the Capitol Hill Club bomb at 12:43 p.m., two plainclothes Capitol Police special agents took a nearly six-minute drive to reach the Capitol Hill South Metro Station, one block from the Capitol Hill Club bomb scene. They then walked to the DNC building, passing the park bench the pipe bomb sat next to.

The agents continued walking until they reached an alley leading to the side of the CBCI building. Their movements were not captured on video because four Capitol Police security cameras that would have shown the DNC crime scene were turned away at key moments or pointed in another direction by default.

Massie’s office released video in July 2023 showing a man in dark clothing and a ball cap approaching a U.S. Secret Service SUV sitting in the driveway of the DNC building as part of Vice President-elect Kamala Harris’ security detail. Harris was inside the building when the pipe bomb was discovered.

Blaze News reported in January 2024 that this man was the plainclothes Capitol Police officer who discovered the pipe bomb under a bush at the foot of a park bench at the DNC building.

Following that story, Massie told Blaze News he was determined to interview the agents, but did not get much cooperation from Capitol Police. Massie referred to the agents as “man-bun guy” and “backpack guy” (the one who discovered the bomb).

‘Weirdest meeting’

The Capitol Police never made “backpack guy” available to the Massie, but on Jan. 30, 2024, they did eventually send his partner, accompanied by his commander, Benedict, to speak with the congressman in a meeting that was not recorded or transcribed.

“So they came over to my office, but not ‘backpack guy,’” Massie said. “’Man-bun guy’ came over, and he had a handler, who would often interrupt and answer questions for him.”

Two congressional investigators sat in on the meeting alongside Benedict, the police officer, and Massie. The congressman later described the interview as the “weirdest meeting in the world.”

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) said an FBI official threatened a criminal investigation of his staff if he didn’t “play ball” on the Jan. 6 pipe bomb investigation.Photo courtesy of Free the People

“In the conversation with the counter-surveillance officer in my office, Ashan Benedict would frequently interrupt the officer, answer before the officer could reply, or qualify the officer’s answers,” Massie told Blaze News. “There was an effort by our committee staff to get Benedict to sit for a transcribed interview, but he successfully evaded that effort.”

Massie said he still wants to interview the officer who actually found the bomb, as well as his partner and Benedict. “Those need to be transcribed interviews. They need to be sworn in. I feel very strongly about that,” he said. “But the reality is the FBI should be doing these things.”

Massie said that after he reposted the Blaze News article on the gait analysis, Bongino called him to complain about two early persons of interest mentioned in the piece.

One of those men, named in FBI reports as Person of Interest 3, lived directly next door to the Capitol Police officer who was the subject of the Nov. 8 Blaze News article. The FBI’s Special Operations Group conducted surveillance on Person of Interest 3 in Falls Church, Va., for two days in January 2021, but surveillance was suddenly canceled, before any law enforcement officer ever questioned the man.

Massie said Bongino told him, “‘That’s a dead lead. … We investigated that lead and … there’s nothing there. There’s no there there.’ So that’s why they quit looking at it. … At that point I said, ‘But you guys weren’t — you never did suspect him. The FBI never did suspect him. … His build doesn’t match. There’s no way it could be him. Your guys were looking for somebody else.’”

Whistleblower concerns

A current FBI supervisory special agent on Nov. 10 filed a whistleblower protected disclosure with Massie and U.S. Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.), alleging the termination of surveillance at the Falls Church condominium complex was improper and cut off a suggestion by a surveillance team member that Person of Interest 3 be questioned face-to-face at his doorstep.

Person of Interest 3 and Person of Interest 2, his alleged houseguest on Jan. 5 and 6, 2021, had not been questioned by the FBI when surveillance was terminated. Interviews took place six days later, according to FBI reports included in the whistleblower disclosure. An FBI agent pretending to be a Metro Transit police officer interviewed Person of Interest 3 over the phone, a congressional source told Blaze News.

The whistleblower’s “concern was that the investigation that went to Falls Church, Virginia, that got them to the doorstep of the person that [Blaze News] identified through gait analysis as possibly somebody that might have been the person in the hood,” Massie said.

“There were suggestions made to the people in charge of the investigation about how to follow up on those leads,” Massie said. “And it was just dropped after two days of surveillance. And he [the whistleblower] provided supporting documents to that effect.”

Capitol Police block off the intersection of 1st and C streets in response to discovery of a pipe bomb at the Capitol Hill Club in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021.U.S. Capitol Police

Massie said Bongino made reference to the FBI conducting a meeting to address the whistleblower disclosure. “He didn’t say, ‘We’re trying to find the whistleblower,’” Massie said. “But my Spidey sense went off, and I almost said to him in that moment, ‘You better not be trying to find the whistleblower, because law protects that individual.’ But I didn’t say it.”

Massie said he thought about this when recalling the threat he said his staff received from the FBI official.

“I have to tell all the listeners this because this is the context in which I'm worried for the whistleblower,” Massie said. “If they're willing to retaliate against a congressional office, which has speech or debate immunity and a lot of other protections, they may be willing to retaliate against the whistleblower.”

The whistleblower’s attorney, Kurt Siuzdak, sent a letter to Massie and Loudermilk on Nov. 13, warning that if the FBI attempted to out the whistleblower, it would violate the supervisory agent’s protections under the law. Massie shared the letter on social media.

“Identifying the whistleblower serves only one purpose,” Siuzdak wrote, “which is to allow FBI management to retaliate.”

In a Nov. 13 post on X, Bongino accused Massie of throwing “BS bombs” and denied that the FBI sought to identify or retaliate against the Nov. 10 whistleblower. A Blaze News request to Bongino for further comment went unanswered.

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Did the FBI SHADOW BAN Charlie Kirk? Censorship EXPOSED



If anyone who questioned the official narrative during the pandemic recalls feeling as if the truth was being rewritten and as if the thoughts they shared via social media on any pressing matters were being throttled by a force greater than just the social media platform — then they’d be right.

In a relentless pursuit of the truth, Matt Kibbe and Matt Taibbi have uncovered blatant collusion between former president Biden’s government and Big Tech during the COVID-19 pandemic to censor the accounts of Americans, including Charlie Kirk, Libs of TikTok, and Dan Bongino, among others.

“The revelation that the FBI and other security agencies were putting direct pressure on social media sites to censor speech was a bombshell. This wasn’t just cowardly CEOs acting on their own,” Kibbe says on “Muckraker,” episode 5 of “The Coverup.” “This was the government clamping down to enforce a narrative in flagrant violation of the First Amendment.”

“And it’s something that’s been going on for years,” he explains, before revealing email proof of the FBI setting up a meeting with Twitter in 2020.


In one email from the FBI, the agency acknowledges the importance of free speech, before asking the social media platform to share any information “indicating malign foreign actors pivoting to any messaging discussing these current events on your platforms.”

“So, they’re basically saying, ‘Yeah, we know speech about the George Floyd stuff is constitutionally protected, but if you think any of it might be, like, Russian influenced or whatever, can you just let us know?’” Taibbi explains.

Taibbi points out that the Global Engagement Center, which was founded via an executive order in Obama’s last year as president, was a counterterrorism organization that initially went after “Arab language tweets” and ISIS recruits.

“After Trump got elected, they started getting interested in all kinds of other topics, and then very soon, they were interested in domestic speech. They’ll deny that. But that’s what they were doing,” Taibbi says.

Taibbi, who published the “Twitter Files,” found that in addition to voices like Charlie Kirk, even Stanford epidemiologist Jay Bhattacharya — who is now the NIH Director — was among those blacklisted and shadow banned.

Taibbi discovered through working alongside a Twitter executive who was ordered by Elon Musk to cooperate with him that Bhattacharya was on a “trends blacklist,” which was visible to some of those who worked for Twitter but not the users themselves.

“It’s sort of like when you’re in Twitter and you want to see a quick summarized readout of what’s going on with an individual customer. Well, they had a thing where you could see the name, and then there would be a bunch of color-coded things on the page,” Taibbi explains.

On Bhattacharya’s page, he recalls that there was a “big box that says, ‘Trends Blacklist.’”

On Kirk’s page, it read, “Do Not Amplify.”

“That was how we discovered that there was indeed shadow banning. What a ‘trends blacklist’ meant was that this account could never trend on Twitter. And it was one of hundreds of things that they could do to your account to deamplify it,” he says.

“The health bureaucracies were involved in content moderation in a pretty intimate way,” he adds.

Tune in to episode 5 of “The CoverUp,” as Kibbe and Taibbi unravel the pandemic industrial complex, exposing how federal health agencies and Big Tech prolonged lockdowns, fueled fear, and hid the government’s role in the creation of the virus.

To watch episode 5 of “The Coverup” or binge the whole series, go to FauciCoverup.com.

BlazeTV's 'The Coverup' reveals how the corporate media became 'proxies for the national security apparatus'



On the latest episode of BlazeTV's "The Coverup," host Matt Kibbe and investigative journalist Matt Taibbi discuss the recent collapse of the corporate media, attributing it to the industry's shift in coverage strategies in response to Donald Trump's first presidential election.

During this time, the press moved in lockstep to promote the Russian collusion allegations against Trump, while simultaneously suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story. Later, the corporate media also collaborated to stifle COVID-era lockdown skepticism and the lab leak theory.

'You have people coming out of the National Security Council or the FBI, and they go right on air.'

Taibbi, one of the investigative journalists behind the Twitter Files, told Kibbe, "When Trump arrived, there was a belief that the old-school, objective form of journalism, where we tell you the stuff and you do what you want with it — that was the tradition for ages in America — that had to go out the window," Taibbi told Kibbe. "Now, it was too important. Trump was too dangerous."

Taibbi rejected this change, adding that "journalists should have distance from politics, even if we were opinionated." Instead of working in competition with one another, journalists began operating "as a team," he explained.

"It's anathema to how journalism, I think, is supposed to work," he continued. "I quickly found myself on the outs."

Kibbe credited the Twitter Files for revealing that a nonprofit organization had been "groom[ing] reporters to sing from the same song sheet and suppress stories before they even happened."

Taibbi stated that a group of the country's most prominent national security reporters were invited in 2016 to "war game what would happen if a story about Hunter Biden and Burisma and a laptop came out."

"This was months before the story came out," Taibbi said, noting that the reporters agreed to participate in the event off the record.

RELATED: Matt Taibbi looking to make congresswoman pay big-time for repeating her smear online

Matt Kibbe, Matt Taibbi. Image Source: BlazeTV

Kibbe described some reporters as "useful idiots."

"Maybe that's not fair," Kibbe said.

"No, I think it's worse than that," Taibbi remarked. "I think they're essentially proxies for the national security apparatus."

Taibbi stated that there are entire news organizations that have relationships with federal government agents, allowing for "a superhighway of information."

"One is broadcasting PR for the other, and beyond that, they're hiring people," he continued. "You have people coming out of the National Security Council or the FBI, and they go right on air."

Taibbi called it "a complete corruption and a complete breakdown of the system." He explained how the media suppresses stories.

RELATED: The media’s misinformation machine is built to last — here’s why

Matt Taibbi. Image Source: BlazeTV

"If you go to work in these big organizations, it's not like anybody tells you, 'Okay, don't write this story, and do write that story,'" he said. "Over time, the values of the organization, they're sort of suffused through the entire bureaucracy. And even at the very lowest level, as a cub reporter, you learn very quickly what your editors want and what they don't want."

"You just learn, 'Well, this is what's gonna get me promoted. This is what's gonna get me a better gig.' And you start writing those stories," he added.

Taibbi noted that reporters with "difficult personalities wash out eventually."

He concluded that the "corporate media is done now" because "they've now screwed up so many stories."

"Even if they try to reorient themselves in the direction of journalism, they're gonna have to start at square one. And they're gonna be beaten out by all these independent sources that are already way ahead of them," Taibbi said.

Blaze News asked Taibbi how he sees the evolution of America's media landscape over the next decade, considering that corporate outlets are experiencing a significant credibility crisis.

"Obviously independent sources will benefit both from a trust standpoint and in terms of audience as the corporate press deals with fallout from mistakes and politicized coverage," he responded.

"The U.S. has a long history of innovating new journalism forms, and I'm pretty confident something great will emerge. However, the new media landscape still hasn't figured out how to monetize long-form investigative reporting, nor does it have the ability to fund full-time beat writers or foreign bureaus yet," Taibbi stated. "So there are serious gaps."

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BlazeTV's 'The Coverup' exposes how the censorship industrial complex silenced Americans during COVID



The censorship industrial complex went to great lengths to stop Americans from questioning the lockdown measures in reaction to COVID-19 as well as the origins of the virus.

On Episode 5 of BlazeTV's "The Coverup," host Matt Kibbe and investigative journalist Matt Taibbi reveal how the federal government, technology platforms, and nongovernmental organizations worked together to censor dissent.

'This is why I was in a panic in 2024, as a global review system didn’t seem far off.'

Taibbi, who reported on the infamous Twitter Files, mentioned how Europe implemented the Digital Services Act, which "essentially forces private companies to engage in censorship." While he called it "encouraging" that the United States remains the one holdout supporting free speech, he noted that it "will take a prolonged, sustained effort to prevent it from being implemented here."

He explained that the federal government used "a number of Orwellian mechanisms" to communicate with social media platforms, such as Twitter, regarding content.

Kibbe stated that the revelation that the FBI and other government agencies pressure social media platforms to censor their users' speech showed that it "wasn't just cowardly CEOs acting on their own."

"This was the government clamping down to enforce a narrative in flagrant violation of the First Amendment," Kibbe remarked.

The federal government placed gag orders on the social media companies so they could not tell their customers, Taibbi added.

RELATED: Patel's 'breakthrough' in COVID origins probe spells trouble for Fauci — especially if his pardon is voided

Matt Taibbi. Image Source: BlazeTV

Kibbe and Taibbi discussed how the Twitter Files revealed that the company had been shadow-banning users, including Jay Bhattacharya, who is now the director of the National Institutes of Health under the Trump administration.

The Twitter Files also revealed that social media companies were pushed to censor not just alleged false information, but also "mal-information, "or information that is "true, but true in a way that doesn't point in the direction the administration wants you to look," Kibbe stated.

Taibbi explained that even NGOs had requested Facebook suppress posts that suggested the COVID-19 virus leaked from the Wuhan, China, lab or discourse that detracts from the authority of health leaders at the time, such as Anthony Fauci.

RELATED: Biden admin covered up potentially deadly COVID vaccine side effects for months: Senate report

Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images)

As far as the government's end goal for the overreach, Taibbi believes the censorship campaign during the COVID era was an attempt to rewire Americans to be more compliant.

"When we looked at these censorship programs, we tried to figure out, what are they doing here? They're not going to just continually censor things over and over again. That's so exhaustive. That's going to take so much energy," he told Kibbe. "Gradually, we realized ... they were trying to re-engineer how people thought generally. They wanted to create a more timorous, obedient kind of person who would just forget to ask questions, who would stop wondering 'why.' And so they're trying to get us to forget we ever had anything to say."

When asked what role independent media could play in countering attempts to implement censorship controls like Europe’s DSA in the U.S., Taibbi told Blaze News that “even high-tech efforts to counter such aggressive platform censorship will hit lots of obstacles.”

“This is why I was in a panic in 2024, as a global review system didn’t seem far off. Independent media is great, but it has limited impact if it’s severely deamplified, which is what already happens in Europe and will happen elsewhere,” he continued.

“Very worried.”

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Inside the pandemic industrial complex: Censorship, coercion, and collusion



Matt Kibbe has remained relentless in his pursuit of the truth about the COVID-19 pandemic. From secretive gain-of-function research to oppressive lockdown policies and aggressive government censorship, Kibbe is diving deep into one of the greatest scandals in our nation’s history — a scandal too many have overlooked.

But the American people deserve clarity on the origins of the virus and why our government responded with lockdowns, coercion, and censorship. Kibbe’s docuseries “The Coverup,” on BlazeTV+, aims to address our long list of unanswered questions.

Episode five — “Muckraker” — drops today. This latest installment follows Kibbe as he teams up with Twitter Files journalist Matt Taibi to discuss how Fauci, Birx, and key health agencies colluded with Big Tech to hide the truth from the public.

“Muckraker” is a plunge into the pandemic industrial complex — an insidious network of health bureaucracies, including the CDC, NIH, FDA, WHO, and several NGOs — that colluded with Big Tech companies to ensure that the COVID-19 narrative, from vaccines to the lab-leak theory and everything in between, was what the government wanted it to be.

In a flagrant violation of the First Amendment, intense pressure coming from both law enforcement and health agencies was directed toward social media companies, which compliantly censored Americans daring to question, theorize, or criticize outside the bounds of what the government deemed appropriate.

This censorship took many different forms. Shadow-banning, for example, was the covert practice used by tech companies to restrict a user's content visibility or reach on a platform without the user's knowledge, often through algorithmic suppression or reduced engagement. Health bureaucracies created and pushed frameworks for content moderation, which social media platforms then adopted. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg confessed that Biden administration officials were brutal in their demands to kill certain ideas in the public square.

Often the content that demanded moderation was information that the government, including health agencies, knew was true — like adverse vaccine side effects — but it was squashed nonetheless if it opposed the approved narrative.

“They were trying to re-engineer how people thought,” Taibbi says.

But thought control wasn’t their only aim. The simultaneous rise in censorship and bioterrorism research is no coincidence.

Tune in to “The CoverUp” episode 5, as Kibbe and Taibbi unravel the pandemic industrial complex, exposing how federal health agencies and Big Tech prolonged lockdowns, fueled fear, and hid the government’s role in the creation of the virus.

To watch episode 5 of “The Coverup” or binge the whole series, go to FauciCoverup.com. Use the code ORWELL to get $20 off your first year of BlazeTV+.

The Russia hoax and COVID lies share the same deep-state fingerprints



“Conspiracy theory” is the go-to smear against those of us who questioned any aspect of the government’s authoritarian response to the COVID-19 pandemic. But as the great Austrian economist Murray Rothbard once observed, the smear serves one purpose: to divert the public’s attention away from the truth.

“An attack on ‘conspiracy theories,’” Rothbard writes in “The Anatomy of the State,” means that the subjects of a regime “will become more gullible in believing the ‘general welfare’ reasons that are always put forth by the State for engaging in any of its despotic actions.”

The democratization of information means that censorship just doesn’t work as well as it used to.

“A ‘conspiracy theory,’” he continues, “can unsettle the system by causing the public to doubt the state’s ideological propaganda.”

The more I dig into the origins of the COVID pandemic, the more “despotic” our state seems to become — and the more “conspiratorial” I get.

Unsettling the system

I am trying to put together the final pieces of the puzzle of what I consider among the greatest public policy scandals of my lifetime — not only who did it, but more importantly, why would they do it?

A few months ago, I spent a day with Matt Taibbi, the iconoclastic muckraker and “Twitter Files” reporter, for the latest episode of my BlazeTV investigative series, “The Coverup.”

As he dug through the trove of emails and texts, Taibbi discovered the conspiracy to blacklist and silence Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the subject of the first episode of “The Coverup” and now the head of the National Institutes of Health. Taibbi soon learned that the same tactics and tools — and even many of the very same deep-state actors — have their fingerprints all over both the Russia collusion hoax and the COVID cover-up.

A precedent for censorship

Recently released documents from Director of National Security Tulsi Gabbard reveal that the so-called Russia collusion hoax wasn’t just wrong — it was deliberate. The Obama administration orchestrated the fabrication, pushing U.S. intelligence agencies to leak a report suggesting Vladimir Putin had helped Donald Trump steal the 2016 election.

That leak, repeated endlessly by the press, fueled a national narrative branding Trump’s presidency as illegitimate — despite those same agencies having already dismissed the claim.

This kind of manipulation would be outrageous if it weren’t so familiar.

Five years after the COVID lockdowns stripped millions of Americans of basic liberties, we’re still uncovering how the deep state used propaganda to silence dissent. Throughout the pandemic, scientists and doctors raised alarms about the damage lockdowns would cause — and did cause. Some of the world’s most respected experts signed the Great Barrington Declaration to oppose the government’s heavy-handed response.

But the public never heard from them. Bureaucrats and media allies moved swiftly to smear, suppress, and sideline these voices using one of the oldest authoritarian tactics: control of information.

In fairness, public health agencies didn’t have to twist many arms. The legacy media followed their lead willingly — even when the guidance contradicted itself or defied basic logic.

But unlike the days of Project Mockingbird, when the CIA could shape coverage by nudging the New York Times or CBS, controlling the old guard wasn’t enough. The rise of social media — decentralized, fast-moving, and open to anyone with a computer or phone — posed a new challenge. The administration needed a more aggressive strategy to dominate the narrative.

Strong-arming social media

In episode 5 of “The Coverup,” I ask Taibbi how they pulled it off. As one of the first journalists to dig into the Twitter Files, Taibbi exposed the machinery behind the censorship regime. Americans suspected that platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube were suppressing dissent during COVID. But the Twitter Files confirmed what many feared: They weren’t acting alone. They took orders from the FBI directly.

And these weren’t polite requests, either. When the government “suggested” something, tech companies treated it as a command.

It all traces back to — surprise, surprise — the Russia hoax.

In 2017, Congress hauled tech executives into hearings and accused them of letting Russian disinformation run wild. Essentially, they were given an offer they couldn’t refuse: Allow the government to play a role in content moderation or prepare to be regulated into submission.

RELATED: On the 9th anniversary of Russiagate, the hoax is finally crumbling

Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images

Their surrender gave U.S. intelligence agencies de facto control over what Americans could say online. The feds told platforms which posts to delete, which users to silence, and how to suppress the rest. You could post your opinion — as long as no one could see it. “Shadow bans” became the preferred method of censorship: clean, quiet, and deniable.

The silver lining

Thanks to Taibbi — and a handful of journalists who still value truth over access — we now see how the government sold Americans on fiction. Russia hacked the election. COVID came from a bowl of bat soup. Question either and you’d vanish from the digital public square.

Millions believed these lies. And under their influence, they did real damage — locking down schools, closing businesses, and sowing doubt about fair elections.

But truth has a way of leaking out.

It’s taken time, but the lies are unraveling. And that’s the silver lining. In a world where information moves faster than censors can keep up, suppression doesn’t work like it used to. So long as we have truth-tellers willing to dig and defy — like Taibbi — the regime won’t have the last word.

We won’t get fooled again.

Episode 5 of “The Coverup” premieres Thursday, July 31.