On "Radio War Nerd" talking about Twittergarchs and Matt Taibbi
I was on Radio War Nerd with John Dolan and Mark Ames this week. We talked a bit about the disastrous trip Evgenia and I took to Russia this autumn, but mostly we discussed the latest spectacle of our bifurcated Perky Pat layout political system: Elon Musk’s “leaking” of The Twitter Files and the two journalists he entrusted with properly handling his political/public relations op: Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss.
From RWN:
Friend of the show Yasha Levine joins us to discuss the big Twitter brouhaha, journalism in the age of oligarchy, former eXile colleague Matt Taibbi, and Yasha's doomed family trip to Russia on the eve of Putin's mobilization drive...
There’s a lot to be said about these leaks — and you can listen to us discuss them from various angles. One of the saddest things about them is that the people on both sides of this holographic media fight really are horrible, and yet we’re supposed to get all emotionally involved in it and pick one oligarchic faction — either TEAM LIB or TEAM MAGA — and root for it like it’s our lord and savior. All the while, nothing about this drama will have any real impact on anyone in America. It’s just feeding the political-entertainment complex and the rich assholes and their hanger-ons that feed off of it.
—Yasha Levine
PS: Matt Taibbi might position himself as a heroic crusader against cancel culture these days. But there’s a rather pitiful backstory to it all. I wrote about it a couple of years ago — check it out if you haven’t read it yet.
Couple of things and I'm definitely going to listen to this. I read several sites like Counterpunch, Consortium News, Mintpress, etc. that seem to have drawn the ire of the so-called powers that be for reporting news and narratives inconvenient to or at odds with the, well, powers that be, lol. You probably know this, but most if not all of them - possibly Grayzone too - were basically cut off from their funding by PayPal and in some cases the sleazebags tried to keep (as in not return) the money that they had in the PayPal system. This is backdrop to the following which I read today at Counterpunch:
1) According to Business Insider, Musk has provided the anti-Palestinian zealot Bari Weiss access to Twitter’s employee systems, added to its Slack, and given a company laptop, a level of access to Twitter systems typically reserved only for staff…[the hypocrisy and troublesome nature of this should be obvious as she is currently trying to "cancel" a few Palestinian supporters in American academia]
2) CounterPunch wasn’t just “shadow banned” on Twitter, we went into total eclipse. For more than a year our followers remained static or declined. We couldn’t even attract bots, Russian or porn. Its editor’s Twitter account (mine) was permanently locked. But there’s never been a single inquiry about this or any other suppressed Leftwing, animal rights, radical green, Occupy Wall Street or pro-Palestinian Twitter account. Why? Because it doesn’t fit the narrative Musk, Taibbi and Weiss want to project. This isn’t about free speech–how could it possibly be when an apex blacklister is in charge of determining what is & isn’t a blacklist?
3) The eXile was one of the best magazines to emerge in the 90s. The problem wasn’t the satirical pieces–worthy of Paul Krassner–but Taibbi’s cowardly renouncement of them–and blaming his partner Mark Ames, all to curry favor with people he once rightly despised and ridiculed.
The rest:
+ Instead of Hunter Thompson, Taibbi’s morphed into David Horowitz…
+ Taibbi likes to think of himself as a “muckraker,” but I can’t think of a single “muckraker” agreeing to secret conditions set by the richest tech mogul in the world to run a story based solely on documents given to him by the same tech lord to be run on that very tech lord’s site. It sure ain’t the way IF Stone did it.
+ When the principle condition of the conditions constraining your reporting is that you don’t name the conditions, you’ve got a problem. You don’t know what the full story is if you’re only printing what your clearly biased source has given you. This is exactly what Judith Miller did with Curveball. Except it’s worse because in this case your source owns the means of publication and requires it to be published there.
+ Mark Ames: “All Musk’s fanboys on this wretched site want nothing more than to cancel their shitlib-enemies’ accounts, you constantly see them snitching and tagging their Hero, just as libs did to them. No principle here, just a buncha snitches riding the oligarchy’s dopamine rollercoaster…”
https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/12/09/roaming-charges-75/
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Disclaimer: I am still a subscriber (monthly) to Taibbi's Substack and occasionally he still reports on things like Wall Street and cryptocurrency ecosystem graft and calls out the corporate media for its blatant stupidity and hypocrisy, however I am losing patience with the way he's decided to double down and go all in on monetizing the "culture wars" - this whole Twitter kerfuffle included. I'm sure he's making serious bank by this point and I don't think missing my $5/month is really going to be noticed. Another point is that I'd bet money I'm one of maybe 10 total people in his commentariat, which is huge now, who has read not just one, but every single actual book he published (as for other authors, ahem, I have "Surveillance Valley" on the shelf and need to get to it). The only reason I mention this last part is to demonstrate that I've been following MT for virtually his entire career dating back to the end of eXile and he's morphing into something altogether different than he once was.
P.S. He and this dude named Douglas Murray (basically a British "western chauvinist" with terrible authorship skills) "debated" career shill Malcolm Gladwell and some woman on whether or not the MSM is to be believed. It was a disaster for everyone concerned (tho, MT and DM won according to the audience). I don't recommend watching it at all, but here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvaf7XOOFHc
Taibbi is capable of producing content beyond a tiny ingrown clique of mentally dysfunctional people on the mostly irrelevant far left. Echo chamber.
Yasha isn’t.
Jealousy is ugly. Irrelevance is also ugly. Hate is also ugly.