Born Again Reaganites

Evgenia and I talked about The eXile and Matt Taibbi on our Red Scare ep — about how the Red Scare girls took a very similar path as Matt, starting out avant-garde and eventually transforming into MAGA-Musk reply gals. Anna and Matt now run in the same political circles…and do humiliating Fox News shows together.

Matt, top left. Anna, bottom right.

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Didn’t really have time to discuss this on the pod but I want to highlight something I wrote a while back about Matt Taibbi’s ideological “transformation” — his drift from running the most radical American literary experiment of his generation…to becoming a good liberal…to then going full Reagonite MAGA boomer and doing it in the most pathetic, most cowardly way possible…groveling and flagellating himself in front of the liberal media establishment, condemning himself and his own writing, snitching on and trying to get an old friend cancelled.

I wrote the essay back in 2020. Since then, there have been quite a few new subscribers, and my guess is that many of you aren’t familiar with it. In hindsight, this essay is about something much bigger than just the career trajectory of one famous journalist. Turned out that Matt’s transformation was part of a larger shift of left-liberal media to the right, which began with the collapse of the Bernie movement and the start of the Covid Era…something we discuss on the ep at length as well. The essay touches on other topics, too — The eXile, how I got into journalism, the rape of Russia by Americans in the 1990s, friendship, media class hypocrisy, and the way that political influencers rebrand themselves to align with power and to stay in the light. In that sense, it is a tale as old as time…

Anyway, here it is:

—Yasha

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PS: Evgenia wrote about Matt Taibbi, too…but from a cultural perspective: “Evgenia Kovda on Matt Taibbi, Gogol, and Cancel Culture.”

You constantly write about how dangerous this new wave of censorship is to art and culture and speech and self-expression, and how stifling it is. But Gogol — your literary hero — proves the exact opposite of your argument: writers have been able to publish radical political novels while under heavy censorship.

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