Matt Taibbi

I made up a funny name for bankers a decade ago.

Parroting squawkbox Pundits

And a dirty dozen more

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“”Once you start getting handed things, then you've lost. They have you at that point and you gotta get out of that habit. You just can't cross that line.

—Taibbi staying objective and not being influenced

Matt Colin Taibbi (1970–) is a former political writer for Rolling Stone. The son of acclaimed NBC journalist Mike Taibbi, he became famous during the early 2010s for his left-wing politics and snarky gonzo-style reporting, having stood up to corporate giants like Goldman Sachs and CitiBank for their role in the Great Recession. Now he's sunk to peddling pro-Putin horseshit and acting as Elmo's personal scribe before being discarded by the oligarch. Guess we missed the middle step.

Career summary

Expat bros

Taibbi made his bones in the free-for-all of post-Cold War Russia, where he played Dollar Tree Hunter Thompson. The eXile, an English-language tabloid aimed at expats like himself, was filled with all the juvenilia of what passed for culture in the '90s. Taibbi's co-editor wrote an article claiming that the kleptocracy of Russia made for a freer society than the liberal democracy of America, because Russian elites only cared about getting rich instead of imposing their moral values on the rest of the country. Among other things, The eXile published a regular column by Eduard Limonov, the founder of the National Bolshevik Party, which kind of says it all.

He got in trouble in late 2017 for what he termed a satire of western expatriates in Russia. A reporter went to Russia and investigated them and found that Taibbi made all of these anecdotes up. When the book came out, one critic said it was just offensively edgy writing and Taibbi threw a coffee mug at him. ^{[No, not The Onion]}

Taibbi has frequently contributed to RT as a guest on Breaking the Set with Abby Martin and The Chris Hedges Report. That said, the idea that he's skeptical of U.S. intelligence because there is some sort of kompromat and he's a Russian asset is thin, considering The eXile was started in '97 and Putin was elected in '99. It's more likely that he arrived at his opinions naturally, like many in his ideological corner.

Holding 2008 perps accountable

Illustration of a vampire squid (Vampyroteuthis infernalis), Goldman Sachs according to Taibbi

“”I’ve spent most or all of that time, 30 years, doing the slogging investigative or pseudo-investigative kind of reporting. I’ve earned a little time to not do that for a year or two.

—Taibbi, already burnt to a crisp in 2021. Now he's an inhalant.

Back in the 2000s and especially during Occupy Wall Street, Taibbi was somewhat of a 'rock star' on the left. He had a flair for invective, which they loved to see deployed against Boris Yeltsin (Matt’s obituary of him is gold), Bush-era lunacies, the Pope, and everything in between—which kind of obscured the fact that his political views couldn't neatly be categorized as leftist. He is most famous for coining the term "vampire squid" to describe criminal bankers, but one of the least-known stories he covered was the LIBOR scandal. LIBOR is basically the rate at which banks lend each other money. The U.S. used it as the benchmark interest rate until 2023. LIBOR is set by bankers pinky-swearing not to collude with each other to manipulate it for their own gain.

His Goldman piece became so famous that the political blogosphere came out and denounced it as "a collection of conspiracy theories," then failed to deny the factual accuracy of the piece. Peak Taibbi was his skewering of Thomas Friedman; he turned into a recurring character, like something on SNL.

He sympathized with Black Lives Matter when it wasn't popular to support it. I Can’t Breathe is his deep dive into the background of Eric Garner’s murder.

Independent media

“”I think he’s gone off the rails. Now I just don’t know what the hell he’s going on and on about. He’s obsessed with stupid shit.

—Doug Henwood, independent journalist and longtime admirer of Taibbi

Beginning around 2014–2015, him and a bunch of others shuffled over to a newly-formed political aisle; sort of an ongoing populist left-right convergence:

The truth is, Trump conservatives and ACLU-raised liberals like myself, [Glenn] Greenwald, and millions of others do have real common cause, against an epistemic revolution taking hold in America’s political and media elite.

This “epistemic revolution” is thereafter explained to be the brow beating talking heads like Taibbi received for helping to legitimize Tucker Carlson and others like him.

It’s not really a problem if Matt appears on Fox, Newsmax, OANN, and RT—though that being said, each one gets progressively worse. He equates Fox and CNN as being the same while giving a pass to the right, either by hand-wringing or just ignoring them. If Taibbi speaks of Trump, he usually ends it with "he's hilarious." He then argues that Trump's critics in the media are worse than Trump himself. Lawyers have told judges that viewers can't possibly take Tucker Carlson seriously and Sean Hannity said under oath that he lied about the 2016 election being stolen. These are supposed journalists with the biggest shows. Taibbi is naïve if he thinks the public is clamoring for a "unbiased" news channel with the cultural cachet of Fox. That's essentially what Fox News daytime and weekends were for the latter half of Trump's presidency, and ratings cratered. Meanwhile the most ideologically-driven shows (Tucker Carlson Tonight, The Five) were the most-watched.

He then went on to be an anti-censorship/"dangers of big tech" type, very on-brand. His series on the “the Censorship-Industrial Complex” is what first alerted Joe Rogan to the coterie of Invermectin shills. It wasn't very well researched, it ignored a lot of red flags (using language like "miracle drug" to promote Ivermectin), the data they presented was rather fishy, and the drug itself had yet to demonstrate clinical efficacy. Taibbi was unfazed by this critique and refused to acknowledge data that was counter to his narrative.

Wish he was as serious about that hagiography film Alex's War. Should've been obvious to anyone who watched that sycophantic interview Greenwald gave him that it was a puff piece for Alex Jones. This very serious man also complimented Matt Walsh on his transphobic movie, calling it funny and complaining that the left can't take a joke anymore.

He got lucky in that debate he did with Douglas Murray. Malcolm Gladwell acted like such a clown that he saved Taibbi and Murray from defending their side.

#Musked

“”Elon, I’ve repeatedly declined to criticize you...

—Not a puff piece, by the way

He was on the beat before Musk gave him the keys: Taibbi compared Musk to the anarchist labor organizers executed after the Haymarket Riot, an amazing comparison if you know about Musk's anti-labor practices. And yes, it's self-serving for him to harp on this point since Musk is problematic from a censorship perspective.

"Twitter Files" was about Twitter telling Rupert Murdoch's New York Post that they couldn't launder an unsourced story through their platform. The conspiracy was that the Democrats made Twitter bury the story, but there is no evidence of that. The only time the Biden campaign got involved was when the GOP tried to post photos stolen from Hunter Biden's iCloud, which showed him smoking crack naked with a prostitute, as a poor attempt at a Wikileaks-type bombshell which fell flat. That being said, the Tweets were links to stolen photos. Nothing to do with Hunter Biden's legal problems or other business dealings. The right pursued this for two years because they were convinced that they would have won the election had Twitter not checked themselves and imposed their own rules on the content.

The Twitter Files were fundamentally Musk and his team selectively feeding Taibbi and others tranches of old Twitter emails. Respectable journalists would not have gotten involved with the Twitter Files in the first place. Weiss, Berenson, Schellenberger; none of these people are straight shooters. And it’s ironic because when Taibbi was writing for Rolling Stone he’d often talk about how working for a monthly magazine gave him an advantage over 24/7 news cycle reporters who don’t have time to fully digest and fact-check information.

Interviews with Taibbi made it clear that he sloppily published what he knew was incomplete information, couldn't defend it when he was called to, then bailed the second Musk hit pause on his ability to monetize the situation. The most bizarre part was when Mehdi Hassan pressed him on Twitter submitting to India's demands for censorship and he was caught flat-footed. There's no way Taibbi wouldn't be aware that criticizing Musk would limit his access to monetizable content. His prelude to all this, arrogantly treating people who saw Putin readying for war like they were gullible infants, was one of the saddest Hail Mary plays. Mark Ames and John Dolan a.k.a. Gary Brecher, who used to work at The eXile, said it was very sad to watch because it made them all look bad.

Taibbi wrote a column on the audacity of a journalist asking him questions about his work. (Does "ad hominem" just mean being fact-checked now?) He then went to Congress and made the same claims that Mehdi had pointed out were false. The real number of flagged Tweets was a little less than he claimed. (22,000,000 or 3,000, what's the difference?) His misuse of brackets conflated the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) with a private nonprofit, the Center for Internet Security (CIS), to falsely argue the government had colluded with social media to censor news items. Taibbi himself doesn’t seem to know if it’s an error, really outing himself as someone who has no idea what he "reports" on. ^{[No, not The Onion]}

Musk released these communications in order to expose some Fed whose job at Twitter was to vet stuff before it was released. But he forgot to fire that Fed from his job of vetting the first batch of "Twitter Files." The owner of a company doesn't know who the in-house lawyers at his company are? ^{[No, not The Onion]}

Having discredited himself, Taibbi removed all links to the #TwitterFiles from his Twitter profile. He claimed he deleted them to protect Musk. They couldn't reach Twitter for a comment because Musk fired the communications department and "the press email auto-replaces with a poop emoji." ^{[No, not The Onion]}

A leprechaun told us the IRS visited Taibbi's home to intimidate him. Who is naïve enough to believe federal employees are doing basic audits on a federal holiday? Ah, so the source is Taibbi himself, as he testified the same sans evidence in front of a group of "Freedom" caucus and MAGA types whose only purpose in life is to generate soundbites for Fox.

External links

• Big if true.

See also

• Truth Social — As soon as they banned links to Substack, Taibbi claimed he was quitting Twitter and ran to Truth Social. Not surprising to see him back to Tweeting fifty times per day.