Afraid or a Fraud?

For Matt Taibbi, the First Amendment ends where his wallet begins.

IN September of 2024, Matt Taibbi was a featured speaker at the “Rescue the Republic” rally in Washington, D.C. Even for a journalist who has taken as many reputational hits in the last few years as Matt has, this was a career low.

Here was the man who once won the Internet by creating the image of the banking industry as a face-raping vampire squid now locking arms with a line-up of anti-vax cranks, sex offenders, washed-up SNL alums and HHS Secretary Wormbrain Garglethroat to deliver a gospel of “populist” grievance to a crowd of MAGA jug hooters.

Matt, an educated man who nonetheless channels Ted “Theodore” Logan when he speaks, stood behind bulletproof glass before a modest crowd to spill the beans on the West’s censorship regimes. He then took a moment to cheer the recent release from torture of a genuine victim of censorship, Julian Assange.

“Congratulations to Julian on getting out, by the way. And shame on every journalist who did not call for his release.”

This line made me do a spit take.... and I wasn’t drinking anything! How could Matt Taibbi throw shame on anyone for not rising to the defense of an embattled journalist when Israel has killed hundreds of journalists during her war on Gaza... often targeting them deliberately... with nary a peep from Matt? In fact, Matt Taibbi has stood mute on the entire topic of the Gaza Genocide for nearly two years!

This was the moment when I realized that Matt’s commitment to free speech, the topic that has become the locus of his entire independent journalistic career, is a pose. And if there is any reporter who is overdue for a shaming it is Matt Taibbi.

This is a tall order... how could you possibly shame a man who is not embarrassed to be the undercard to Rob Schneider? Yet the attempt must be made, and not just because of Matt’s ambivalence towards Gaza, but because hearing Matt Taibbi drone on endlessly about free speech while emitting a deafening silence about the censorship that has been taking place in our country since October 7^th, 2023 ought to blow out the eardrums of any First Amendment defender.

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ACTIVIST and songwriter Phil Ochs once said, “In every American community there are varying shades of political opinion. One of the shadiest of these is the liberals. An outspoken group on many subjects, ten degrees to the left of center in good times, ten degrees to the right of center if it affects them personally.”

As an OG Matt Taibbi dick rider, I would never have believed, decades ago when I first fell in love with Matt’s writing, that I would someday conclude that Ochs had been speaking about him.

Matt may never have been the hard livin’ “gonzo” journalist that Rolling Stone marketed him as when he became one of their regular contributors in 2004 after several years spent publishing a devious tabloid in Russia called The eXile, but there is certainly a daring, Indiana Jones quality to the man that his writing does not undersell. His best work is also laugh-out-loud funny. Some of the Matt Taibbi moments from his early career that stick with me include a piece he wrote where he war-gamed out the 9/11 “inside job” conspiracy to defenestrate 9/ll Truthers, as well as the many times he whacked the candy out of his personal piñata, the metaphor-challenged Thomas Friedman. I was also grateful for Matt’s unflattering take on the 2004 protests at the GOP’s National Convention in New York City (where I was arrested), a missed opportunity for political change that I have seen the left repeat often.

These days, Matt Taibbi’s name is rarely spoken without being preceded by the words “what the fuck happened to”. While those people tend to be referring to Matt’s politics, they could also be speaking about his writing, which has become more pedantic and curmudgeonly in recent years. But in the beginning, I’d never read a journalist who was as clever or as awake as Matt Taibbi.

Despite having refused any formal commitment to the left wing, I always considered Matt Taibbi to be in their auxiliary thanks to his Occupy-friendly attacks on banking and finance and his undisguised sympathies for Bernie Sanders. It sure as hell never occurred to me that the guy would someday be the darling of the fluoride-skeptical wing of the GOP. So just how did this cowboy anarchist degenerate into a featured speaker at “Rescue the Republic”, the kind of far-right medicine show that a young Matt Taibbi would have dropped acid for and attended on assignment for Playboy?

On the surface, “what the fuck happened to Matt Taibbi” is easy enough to answer. In 2017, around the time that Taibbi was publishing I Can’t Breathe, his non-fiction narrative of the murder of Eric Garner by New York City police (one of the seminal crimes that fueled the BLM movement), Matt got sideswiped in a phony #MeToo smear when he and Mark Ames (Matt’s former colleague at The eXile) were accused of lewd and misogynistic treatment of women during their time in Russia.

The claims were bogus, but Matt’s book tour was cancelled. Later, Matt left Rolling Stone over disagreements with the magazine’s coverage of the Russiagate hoax. Other career and cultural hits fueled by the changing landscape of journalism and the rise of cancel culture suddenly rained down on Matt like golf ball-sized hail, and with his reputation and job prospects contracting, Matt’s work began to veer into a familiar “the left left me” narrative which many a political prostitute faced with cancelation has resorted to as a prelude to turning tricks for the right wing.

Matt began to appear frequently on Fox News. He peppered his online columns with screeds against Robin DiAngelo, Herbert Marcuse and other names that would be familiar to a Jordan Peterson fan (he also discovered the excesses of the trans movement at this time.) Scott Adams, who was in the process of running a similar campaign of reputation smashing to shore up his own far right bona fides, also began singing Matt’s praises.

His legs spread, Matt now made his grand, cherry-busting tout to the MAGA movement: the Twitter Files, the result of Matt Taibbi’s collaboration with the galaxy-brained “free speech absolutist” and sub-trillionaire Elon Musk.

In 2022, Musk, the new and regretful owner of Twitter, was desperately in need of something big to sex-up his obvious mismanagement of the once headline-moving platform. He therefore provided Matt Taibbi (and others) with access to curated documents from Twitter’s previous regime with a mandate that they use this information to rock our world.

And what did Matt find? Brace yourselves: I honestly don’t know. There are not enough gold coins in a dragon’s horde to entice me to read more than five lines of Matt’s aeons-long expose. By osmosis I have learned that Matt discovered that Twitter’s previous liberal-leaning owners helped Joe Biden quash dissemination of pictures of his son’s M&M-decorated hog and that they were open to (but not obligated by) requests from Federal agencies (Trump’s agencies, mind you) to reduce the influence of individuals and causes that were disfavored by the government, like COVID vaccine hesitancy.

Okay... fine. Is there bad stuff in the Twitter Files? I’m sure that there is. Am I shocked that a government that whacked Jeffrey Epstein in his jail cell would ever stoop to strongarming a media outlet? No Matt, I can’t say that I am. (And the plain fact is that nothing revealed in the Twitter Files could possibly be more sinister than having the very guy who commissioned them buy his way into the Oval Office to chainsaw the Federal workforce while selling his brutally ugly “Homer” mobiles on the White House lawn.)

“Everything’s computer!”

What happened next could be the greatest bitch slap of karma in human history. Elon “Free Speech” Musk soon began nuking Twitter accounts that mocked him, suspended journalists for covering topics he didn’t want them to, and bullied Matt Taibbi himself to ditch his profitable Substack business and publish exclusively through Twitter, shadowbanning him when he didn’t.

The result is that Matt Taibbi became the only person punished over the Twitter Files, and Matt’s groveling DM’s with Musk as he tried to restore his status on Twitter dropped Matt’s dignity down to the level of that doctor who pulled the pus out of Baron Harkonnen’s boils.

“You are so beautiful, my Elon! Your tweets… love to me!”

In the end, all we learned from the Twitter Files is that mods are gods. But at last Matt’s sacrifice of his old fan base was complete. Matt Taibbi had made his move ten degrees to the right, and henceforth his beat would be focused on the least odious of the alt-right’s priorities: non-Elon related threats to free speech.

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MATT now crusades against Internet censorship, shadowy government thought police, elitist HR know-it-alls and the fierce urgency of letting a thousand European far-right parties bloom. Indeed, some of the bugbears that stalk Matt deserve exactly the exposure he gives them. But this makes it doubly curious why Matt Taibbi is conspicuously deaf, dumb and blind to the very obvious government and media suffocation of one type of speech in particular, through coercion that is at least equal to the methods that keep Matt up at night. This speech is, of course, any public criticism of Israel.

I therefor hold this truth to be self-evident: Matt Taibbi, First Amendment super soldier, is an outright coward when it comes to crossing swords with Zionism.

Now before you say, “Not MY Matt!” let me remind you, dear reader, of what it means to pick a fight with Israel, a country that can attach bombs to thousands of unwitting people, detonate them all simultaneously and still condemn “terrorism” with a straight face.

To openly acknowledge the number of genuflections to Zionism and/or Israel that one regularly encounters in the media could easily get a guy wondering if they haven’t been dosed with whatever Kanye is on. You already know that you could pull out a congressman’s fingernails and never hear them speak an ill word towards Israel, just as no amount of bombed Gazan hospitals will make a major news outlet shed even the number of tears for Gaza’s countless victims that they once shed for Kuwait’s fabricated “incubator babies”. That’s how deep Israel’s claws are dug into America’s flesh... but it hardly stops there.

Make the mistake of recontextualizing the Holocaust as being an expression not of racism but of “man’s inhumanity to man”, as Whoopi Goldberg did on The View in 2022, and you will be bounced from your show until you are ready to apologize. Spare a kind word for Palestinian children, as entertainer Ms. Rachel recently did, and Zionist freaks will be on the horn with Pam Bondi the next morning. And since the beginning of the Gaza Genocide even South Park has flinched at having the character of Cartman make his trademark tasteless digs at Kyle Broflovki’s Jewishness (he now mocks Kyle’s hair color). That’s right: South Park, the program that once demanded the right to risk their own Charlie Hebdo massacre by portraying the Prophet Mohammed in cartoon form has had their string clipped not by ISIS but by Canary Mission.

Since 10/7, of course, Zionism has been completely unleashed against the American left, and the lengths that first the Biden administration and now the Trump regime have gone to to crush dissent against Israel dwarfs even the post-9/11 jingoism of the George W. Bush years. I have truly never seen anything like it in my lifetime, and all of it in service to a potato chip-sized piece of Middle Eastern real estate that stopped being useful as America’s Airstrip One long ago.

For nearly two years, with the charge of “ANTI-SEMITISM!” serving as both sword and shield for every Zionist excess, we have endured the news media faithfully blurring the line between self-defense and holocaust, we have witnessed the minor inconvenience of a few of Columbia University’s special snowflakes being forced to hear a critique of Israel for the first time in their lives transformed in the public’s mind into a crime worse than the Tree of Life massacre, and we have beheld university presidents being hauled before Congress and forced to plead for their jobs because some Jewish billionaire got his nose out of joint... and then watched them get cashiered anyway!

And all that was under a liberal President! Under the self-declared King of America, we have seen even these absurdities multiply like the Andromeda Strain, each day bringing new assaults on free expression: Universities that were already on their knees have yielded to blatant intimidation from the Federal government meant to silence any hope of resisting the Genocide, law firms have been extorted for millions in free legal services to combat “anti-Semitism”, and one green card holder after another has been imprisoned for having exercised their Constitutional rights to criticize Apartheid Israel. (God only knows what list you are on if you ever bought one of those tents from Amazon that were dotting campuses during the height of the protests.)

With all these examples and your own personal grab bag of pro-Israeli cucking to draw from, can there be any doubt that a paranoiac like Matt Taibbi absolutely factors the cost of being called an “anti-Semite” into what comes out of his mouth, now that so many of his avenues for advancement are foreclosed? (Before you answer, please watch this video of YouTuber Sabby Sabs trying to force Matt to stake out a position on Israel/Palestine. You’d think he’d been snared by To Catch a Predator!)

There was a time when even a Matt Taibbi hater could give Matt the benefit of the doubt and ask what it was worth to have him speak out on Israel. The collective weight of the pro-Palestine movement couldn’t even budge Kamala an inch to the left, so what good could one man with two million Twitter followers possibly do?

Now however, with the continuation of the Gaza Genocide (to say nothing of a brewing Israeli-engineered Armageddon with Iran) dependent more than ever on smothering free speech, Matt’s reticence is making a joke of the reputation for courage and intolerance for bullshit that was always the bedrock of his appeal. But if the unbelievable number of reporters, doctors, small children, humanitarian aid providers and even their own hostages that Israel has snuffed isn’t enough to force Matt to take a stand, how about just doing it for the sake of his own integrity?

Taibbi loyalists have responded to Matt’s vow of silence regarding Israel by stating that there are a million topics a reporter can choose to cover, and Matt has every right to stick to his beat. Well, yes... except that the beat Matt has elected to walk concerns flagrant attacks on the freedom of speech, a freedom Matt now seems happy to watch have a flaming tire hung around its neck just so long as it doesn’t affect him personally... and the only thing guaranteed to have it affect him personally is for him to open his goddamn mouth about it!

I completely agree with Matt Taibbi’s right to turn his back on what he calls “the left”. Career and reputation wise, Matt has been done dirty by America’s douchey liberal witch hunters and vengeful Democrats. Matt Taibbi was one of the writers who taught me to be skeptical of America’s political class. Now Matt is teaching me a new lesson, about how one man’s butthurt can turn into a case of journalistic colon cancer.

Meet the censored: Mahmoud Khalil—grabbed by ICE in front of his wife for the crime of protesting a genocide, Rümeysa Öztürk—arrested and threatened with deportation for writing about a genocide, Mohsen Mahdawi—swept up by ICE at his own naturalization hearing for protesting a genocide.

Matt, have you been so deeply wronged by “the left” that you won’t rise to protect the free speech of these political prisoners and the others sure to follow?

I’d like to think that you will, but I’m not holding my breath.

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