Cancel and Make-Up

Glenn Greenwald tried to cancel Matt Taibbi on behalf of his billionaire boss. But now Glenn and Matt are best buds crusading against cancel culture together?

Jul 30, 2020

So I’m working on something about the sudden liberal-centrist swell against cancel culture — when I came across Matt Taibbi chumming it up with Glenn Greenwald about his dispatches from the trenches of the Great Cancel War of 2020.

And I thought: Does Matt have no fucking dignity?

Zaid Jilani @ZaidJilani

"How the Left Became the Right" -- we had a great time recording this episode of @thebackchan , a conversation between @mtaibbi and @ggreenwald. Also appearing: @lwoodhouse and @ShantMM

youtu.beHow the Left Became the Right. With Matt Taibbi and Glenn GreenwaldWhy is the left starting to act more like the right? To answer that question, The Backchannel is joined by two of the country’s most prominent left-of-center...

I’m old enough to remember when Glenn Greenwald stuck a rusty shank into Matt’s side as Matt got gang-jumped and pushed out of Pierre Omidyar’s First Look Media, the billionaire-backed media outfit initially set up to publish Edward Snowden’s leaks.

Back then it was pretty clear that the whole point was to preemptively discredit Matt by smearing him a sexual harasser — just in case he decided to break his NDA and criticize his billionaire boss’ crude intervention into what was supposed to a totally independent magazine being set up to investigate corporate power and corruption. My editor Paul Carr at (the now defunct) Pando covered this in great detail at the time. Turned out that going to work for a rapacious oligarch didn’t go as well as Matt had planned…and he got badly roughed up on the way out.

Back then Glenn tried to cancel Matt on behalf of his billionaire boss. But now Glenn and Matt are best buds crusading against cancel culture together?

That’s pretty sad.

But it’s generally inline with many of today’s anti-cancel culture crusaders — who don’t mind cancelling people for the right reason at the right time. Clearly this liberal and center-right pushback against cancel culture is all about safeguarding the Enlightenment. We must protect the American Experiment!

Will have more on this soon. In the meantime…subscribe!

—Yasha Levine

UPDATE: I finally wrote this up: “Matt Taibbi is a cancel culture hypocrite. Here’s what Matt hopes you don't remember: When the cancel mob came for him, he was the ‘upper class Twitter Robespierre’ ratting on his colleagues.”

The War Nerd @TheWarNerd

This is a very important article. I was there for a good deal of it. There are countries where they have to kill you to shut you up but in the US journalism elite, all they have to do is shun you. That's very un-eXile.

yasha.substack.comMatt Taibbi is a cancel culture hypocriteHere’s what Matt hopes you don’t remember: When the cancel mob came for him, he was the “upper class Twitter Robespierre” ratting on his colleagues.