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.
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…”
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
I dropped Taibbi a while ago. I'm still on his unpaid mailing list, so I get notices of his posts and I sometimes watch the "read-aloud" videos of a few of them.
As you say, he has a good line on financial scams and mainstream media. He has a good style and can be funny when he chooses, too. But then I realised what the problem is: it's nothing I don't know already, from more honest, if not as festive sources. Pam and Russ Martens are just as good on finance, and basically everyone who follows Counterpunch knows what the mainstream media is about these days. They're low-hanging fruit, so one doesn't become any wiser about them by reading Taibbi, if only they also bother to read non-mainstream left-wing sites (or even the centre-wing ones, like Moon of Alabama). It's like admiring Putin because he calls the West out in his speeches: it's easy to be right about that, even if you're wrong about basically all the rest. Like, a six-year-old could call NATO out on their shit these days, should we give Putin a medals for being blunt about it?
I think this week's clusterfuck tells you all you need to know about Taibbi: while he was lost basking in the glory of once again exposing the Bidens for being what everyone knows they are already, I didn't hear one peep from him about the most important event of the week, namely the throwing under the bus of the rail workers. (Or maybe it just didn't get in my mailbox.) Which has been the main point of discussion in Counterpunch the entire week. So much for getting his priorities right.
Fuck it, I deleted a long response about Putin/Russia/NATO/FUKUS, but wanted to say that speaking of stating the obvious, criticizing liberals and neoliberal economic policy belongs in the same category of the things you're mentioning. Like who doesn't already know that typical liberals and MMT/FIRE sector dominance aren't easy to criticize. I'm at the part of the podcast where they say Matt topped a million followers on Twitter. LMFAO. I'll never send that guy another cent.
My email notifications are on, so I'm able to rescue your response:
"You know, I wanted to revisit the part about Putin and NATO. Yes, to people like us who have been (and I'm assuming here) reading anti-Empire (proper noun intended) and left-wing critiques of the economy and neoliberalism for a long time, what he says is obvious. I also don't put any stock into the opinions of people who merely echo what Putin says and/or worship him or his words. That said, it isn't as though any other world leaders or even thought leaders are saying some of the truths he repeats about the US hegemon or NATO. I've read many machine translations of his speeches, and while of course many are full of propaganda, there isn't another world leader of his stature (and -alleged?- domestic approval ratings) who speaks as clearly and knowledgeably as he does (perhaps the same could have been said of Hitler, but I've never read any of his speeches TBH). Regardless, who else IS calling out NATO? Like who with a voice -AND- a platform? My thoughts on the Ukraine situation are complex - too complex to get into here - I'm as anti-war as you can get, but to deny that Putin (and Russia and the Douma) were provoked into this war is delusional. I just keep going back to the analogy of China staging a coup in Mexico - which they had already named to the pro-China military farm team, the states of Chihuahua and Guadalajara then demanding more autonomy in response to new right wing anti-American/English laws and roaming nazi-adjacent thugs and being shelled for 8 years because of it. What would the USA do? I'm certain the response would be far harsher than Russia's in response to the NATO-ization of NATO farm team Ukraine. I don't agree with Yasha's idea that Russia could have insisted on a peacekeeping force as this would have been viewed and sold to the western world through the Mighty Wurlitzer as Russian aggression and occupation. The rest of Europe (France, Germany, the EU and UN) clearly weren't interested in enforcing Minsk I or II and the USA and UK were busy actively arming up the Ukrainians and likely assisting their (genocidal?) campaign of terror directed at the Donbass region. I mean seriously, what SHOULD "Putin" (as though he's the monolithical decider of all Russian gov't actions?) have done? I'm not awarding him any medals and I likely wouldn't agree with most of his domestic right-wing Russian politics, but I am curious as to what any other leader in his shoes could have done? From what I gather the FUKUS/NATO favored "opposition" leader Alexy Navalny is even further to the right and more nationalistic than Putin. What are the other options?"
I'm more or less on the same footing as you are. Putin is an old-school ethnonationalist, an Orthodox choir boy whose domestic policy is basically austerity and letting the markets decide on outcomes. His foreign policy is shrewd most of the time, but in Ukraine I do think he genuinely believed himself out of options. But I do think he could've tried an embargo of energy sales to Europe (or of rocket engines and titanium to the US, for that matter) and other measures before moving for war. However, that might not have worked. There's also the fact, emphasised by Moon of Alabama's Bernhard, that in the couple days before Russia decided to invade the OCSE monitors of the ceasefire line showed an intensification of shelling coming from the Ukrainian to the separatist side, a fact mostly glossed over by the mainstream media. If we agree to his conclusion that Zelensky was preparing a major ground incursion into the LDPR side, Putin's line that Russia was trying to prevent a brutal assault against the Russian-speaking population there has at least some credence.
I have no sides in this stupid, sad war, which is causing suffering on both sides of the border among the common people, and having the arms dealers laugh all the way to the bank. But I can't say what I'd have done in Putin's place.
Yeah, I'm pretty much with you on all of that. Regarding the possibility of embargoes or refusal to trade in certain goods/commodities, I think the western corporate media would have simply continued to vilify Russia/Putin and to escalate pressure for even further sanctions, not to mention increase arms transfers to Ukraine and accelerate their ability to enter NATO officially. But yes, the stupid sad war grinds onward and drags all of us closer and closer to, if not nuclear annihilation, a large ground war in Europe and the return of fascism/nazism both there and in North America.
Totally agree - no mention of the rail strike in any article or news of the week - and I'd add Assange. Taibbi is fucking silent on Julian Assange. Like to the point of absurdity. It's like he's been "got to" and made a deal that involved him never mentioning Assange again.
Oh, and also he removed his book "I Can't Breathe" book from his profile. Hmm...I wonder why.
But yeah, I can get better Wall Street reporting at WallStreetOnParade.com or Naked Capitalism. Matt has sold out and it's pathetic.
I noticed that silence as well, altho I'm not sure what I expected. Matt's content for the last year or three has felt like a lot of oblique, weak approaches to anti-woke stuff that seems like other outlets already pretty much got on lock down since it's their sole focus, so I'm not really sure what I'm hanging around for at this point.
I am no longer a subscriber to Taibbi. He's lost me. I'm with Ames and Yasha, the former who can admit he was a right winger and knows the kind of scum involved in that ecosystem.
Good comments especially about Taibbi morphing into Horowitz, how apt. I replied to some guy on Twitter who couldn’t understand why more progressives were excited about the Twitter files. I replied maybe it was questioning the wisdom of collaborating with a right wing oligarch and a journalist who is a supporter of Israeli apartheid, as well grovelling to one of the most loathsome right wing members of Congress (Jordan). Also is it a good tactic to go all-in with one faction of the oligarchy in its efforts to take down another faction. Right away I was swarmed by what I took were Greenwald, Taibbi and Dore fanboys and girls berating me for having the audacity to question the whole sordid effort, and some implying I must be a ‘shitlib’. I think the bigger issue is how progressives are to navigate between on the one hand collaboration with social-democrats who are willing to trade incremental improvements at home in exchange for support for empire (‘the squad’ in US, Labour in Britain, NDP in Canada), and on the other hand those who recommend collaboration with the populist right with its fake anti-elitism and ultra-nationalism (showing up on Tucker Carlson, joining right wing anti-war efforts etc.). Both are bad options.
There's a whole lot to unpack there. I'm fine with Taibbi's reporting on the Twitter Files (with one key caveat, more in a bit) and I haven't read a single thing from Bari Weiss or that other dude, Shellenberg (sp?). Totally agree that cozying up with a rabid supporter of colonial apartheid Zionism isn't a good look, and it does actually hurt your credibility, thus bringing into question your real motives and genuineness. That last part brings me back to Taibbi - the one caveat I have is that so far as I've been able to tell, we still don't know whether the emails he was given were like super cherry-picked by Elon and his cronies before handing them over and thus possibly leaving out conflicting narratives and the like. Same question probably applies to the other two 'reporters' (not scare quotes, just a means of differentiating Taibbi - an actual journalist - from Weiss and what's-his-face, who are a pundit and historian, respectively I think).
But back to Taibbi again, I do think that even if the info was cherry picked, there is still enough damning evidence pointing to massive infiltration by and collusion between the USG (primarily through the 3LAs like FBI, DHS, CIA etc.) and the big social media platforms. I guess Yasha would say that anyone who expected otherwise is pretty naive and/or ignorant by this point in time. So from that angle, yeah I do see some cynicism or at least greed in Taibbi's output via the Twitter Files. Sensationalizing something that most people probably SHOULD already suspect isn't the best look either, but I still think it's important that more people know how that crap works. That said, I am disappointed in the 'progressive' reaction because it HASN'T been what I mentioned above.
It hasn't been "duh, you didn't already know that there's massive collusion between the feds/law enforcement and social media/Internet companies?" but instead it's been smears via guilt by association, minimizing/denying what has been published and/or turning it into a partisan issue thus further exploiting the big divide and making it worse when it was really a chance to come together, at least on some very basic demands that shouldn't be partisan in any way in a normal country. I.e., Can we all agree that there is improper, clandestine collusion, government-pushed censorship, infiltration and pressure put on 'information' companies and that it needs to be exposed and then kept in check no matter which of the two War Parties happens to control which part of the government? IMO the progressive response has also, whether overtly/knowingly or in the 'useful idiot' sense, only given more cover and legitimization to the process(es) and agencies who have been exposed - AND - has furthered the debunked and unhealthy narratives about Russian interference in our elections and other similar pap. "But the FBI is just trying to help keep our elections safe!" seems to be the dominant message I'm hearing from progressives(!) these days.
IOW, just because it's the Corporate Democrats being fingered in this particular case, and this gives disingenuous rightwing assholes like Tucker and Bari way too much positive exposure, doesn't mean that it isn't equally applicable the next time the Corporate Rightwing Rethugs are in power?
In many ways I'm far to the left of any of the left-leaning factions you mentioned, especially with regard to support for Empire, and I'm having trouble finding many like minded people these days. But even if Tucker is poison 90% of the time, is it a bad thing that the other 10% of the time he's spreading ostensibly anti-war messaging to his right wing followers? IMO, the main item on the overall agenda should be seriously crippling Empire and the surveillance state. If that means occasionally collaborating with political enemies, we must be very careful to be as objective as possible and to push back against the poison that constitutes 90% of their other 'work' as often as possible.
Heck, I got so lost in my thoughts I'm not even sure I addressed your comment. LOL
Thanks for taking the time to reply to my post with some really good insights. Not living in the US and watching all of this North of the border, appreciate further information and explanation from people living there to help think through this thorny issue. I do agree that any details on how the deep state colludes with social media to promote preferred government narratives is valuable in terms of public awareness, even if it sometimes comes from unsavoury sources. My only concern is when Glenn Greenwald and others start doing victory laps while at the same time ignoring how Republicans and their deep state allies do the same thing as Democrats, but in different contexts. Right now Jim Jordan and the Select Committee on the COVID pandemic is meeting, and at the same time the FBI and DoE published dubious reports on the origins of COVID which support the Republican narrative (interesting that Greenwald takes these reports at face value even though they go against the accumulated scientific evidence). As you point out Republicans are not the lesser evil despite the actions of Biden, Blinken and the rest. Both parties are equally complicit in the crimes of empire.
I am being flippant here, but I have to admit, anyone who can write a sentence like this amuses me and gets some of my time 😉👇
"....It’s like sending an intercontinental shit-missile screaming into the dais of the White House correspondents’ dinner at 15,000 m.p.h. If you can’t see the humor in this, you probably never had a sense of humor to begin with...."
via Taibbi, discussing the Twitter Files process:
"....Two weeks later, I feel differently. In this particular instance, the story has to come out on Twitter. There’s the obvious deep irony of using the familiar drip-drip-drip format and uncontrollable virulality of Twitter to roast Twitter itself. We’re also using an inherently destabilizing medium to expose efforts to turn Twitter into an authoritarian instrument of social control. There’s genius in this. Now I would feel wrong even thinking of doing it any other way.
This is especially the case since a major subtext of the Twitter Files project is what a burn it is on conventional/corporate media, whose minions tried for years to turn Twitter into a giant conformity machine, and cheered each new advance in censorship and opinion control. Those same people now have to watch in helplessness as one horrifying revelation after another spills out, guerrilla-style, into what was not long ago their private playground. This, too, couldn’t be scripted better. It’s like sending an intercontinental shit-missile screaming into the dais of the White House correspondents’ dinner at 15,000 m.p.h. If you can’t see the humor in this, you probably never had a sense of humor to begin with...."
I was unable to post this (below) yesterday, so I restarted my [web] browser, cleared the cache, and logged back in.
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Taibbi (or one of his handlers) banned me, citing the fact that some creepy [troll] had sent me a death threat in the comments section in response to my merciless counter-trolling of a variety of his asshole substack subscribers (tr0llz, b0tz, lunatics, paranoid conspiratards, leftards and general imbeciles and idiots).
Getting banned for someone else, a complete lunatic, sending me a death threat was "interesting".
I sent several emails to Taibbi and substack tech support asking if his email had been hacked, and never got a response. As soon as the twitter files thing is done, I'm unsubscribing.
One of the more epic troll/countertroll flame wars was in the comments section under Taibbi's post about Katie Halper getting fired by some Zionist media boss for daring to submit an article critical of Israeli "Apartheid".
The AIPAC/Zionist trolls were so obvious, and so hyper toxic that it was ridiculous.
I eventually compiled a list of the troll accounts and created a dedicated subtread with something like 100 (200?) links to the bizarre Zionist/AIPAC troll comments, lies, distortions, etc.
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After something like 2 years of relentless counter trolling to get Taibbi's attention about his gross lack of taking responsibility for curating his comments section and about the need for "big" writers like him to demand that substack implement a "mute/ignore/block" function for non-admins, he did nothing (as far as I can tell).
His (or his team's) banning of me did come very soon after I said something critical of his (crappy, co-written) article about how long it was taking for the Las Vegas election count to happen.
I also got banned by Bari Weiss on her "the free press" substack for relentlessly counter-trolling some insane right trolls, paranoid conspiratards and a particularly ridiculous "left" race grifter. My guess is that most o those trolls are from the AIPAC troll farm, or some other similar troll farm (Alex Jones, Koch Bros).
Weiss (or her handlers) didn't even bother to send me an email explaining the ban (which I would have responded to same as with Taibbi, pointing out Team Weiss' abject lack of responsibility in curating her comments section, and the resulting proliferation of numerous paranoid conspiratardz, tr0llz, b0tz and complete idiots).
The Weiss ban came soon after I argued with some farcically idiotic AIPAC/Zionist troll about the use of the term "Apartheid" to describe Israeli policy toward Palestinians in the Occupied Territories.
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Previously I got banned by Greenwald, also for relentlessly insulting a bunch of utterly retarded tr0llz in order to get Greenwald's attention about his irresponsibility in curating his comments section to get rid of the tr0llz, b0tz and idiots.
My guess is that there are some high-level toxic Zionists involved in the operation of Substack. Substack apparently does not care about the huge number of Soros trolls and other troll farm bots that proliferate in the comments sections of "big" writers.*
It is also possible, and maybe more probable that substack is just another example of tech/social media "enshittification".
* note: this is more of an advertisement for F5's anti-bot products than an independent analysis, but it does appear to validate the fact that social media, including substack comments, are shit holes full of trolls, bots and lunatics.
Wait I'm not quite following. Did you say you've been banned by Taibbi and Greenwald or were you excerpting someone else who did? I didn't check the Doctorow link yet.
LOL. And you don't think that Yasha is smart enough to produce "content" (your word, not anyone else's) that's capable of appealing to a broader swathe of people if he really wants to get rich in so doing?
Matt was born and raised in extreme privilege by the standards of 95% of the globe's population and I seriously doubt when you're lauding him that you're talking about his work as an author of books like "The Divide" or "I Can't Breathe" and the like. But who knows, maybe I have you all wrong.
I know this is a response to a 4 month old comment, but meanness for the sake of meanness is also ugly.
“Banger” of an episode! It seems all this is more spectacle that doesn’t affect normal people. Once again we get a view into the lives of the elite instead of opportunities to better our own.
I listened to this while biking 57 miles in pouring, cold rain for over the duration of the episode. Soaked and shivering but the pod kept on. 😀
Late to this party, but really found this podcast enlightening. I always thought Taibbi's shtick might have changed as a result of starting a family, which tends to remove certain I-don't-give-a-fuck luxuries and punk angst to make the space to work towards a more financially secure legacy. This conversation definitely added a lot of context to the whole picture. A lot of it checks out. His substack work has repeatedly drawn from that 'golden age naivete' (which rings like bland old exceptionalism). I always felt cop-out energy with the 'taking a break from Useful Idiots to work on a book' - we'll see how that turns out.
"You'll be nowhere" totally feeling that. Oh "political neutering platform" I got to remember that.
That "feeding the political-entertainment complex" framing sticks, like it or not.
I find that Aaron Mate's voice is more pleasant and understandable than Taibbi's on UI.
They are both funny, but Taibbi can be a little bit more funny, at times.
The Taibbi-Kirn conversations are funnier than UI, even though Katie Halper can be very funny, usually in an understated way. Her dripping nose/kleenex schtick is precious. A pure delight.
Kirn's articles seem to be somewhat uneven, some are very good and some aren't very interesting, such as his endless laments about the horror of bourgeois tourists in Montana.
The best tourist horror I ever saw was in Andorra, on the border with Catalonia/France, watching some 30-something French mothers coming out of a MacDonalds with their kids looking completely disgusted, like they had just eaten (american) dogfood!
Hopefully some bureaucrat at the CDC will send Kirn to European tourist spots to report on the stochastic postmetaphysical scatology and PTSD side effects of american fast food consumption.
Mason LaVerle is a young man on a mission–a mission to save his people’s way of life. Mason was raised in a tiny, isolated Montanan sect, the church of the Aboriginal Fulfilled Apostles. But the Apostles face a dwindling membership, so Mason is sent on an outreach operation to bring back converts–specifically brides. As he discovers shopping malls,
[->] fast food,
and faster women, the forces of faith and the forces of America collide, leading Mason to the brink of missionary madness.
Just ran across this article. LOL. Man Twitter and Elon Musk. What a clusterfuck. Also I listened to the RWN podcast and agreed with almost everything said about Matt Taibbi and Elon/Twitter.
Elon Musk has reportedly given Twitter staff until 5 p.m. Saturday to respond to an email he sent and pledge not to leak internal information about the company to the media.
Journalist Zoe Schiffer of Platformer tweeted out the Musk missive which comes despite the Twitter CEO’s public push for free speech and transparency.
“This will be said only once: If you clearly and deliberately violate the NDA that you signed when you joined, you accept liability to the full extent of the law & Twitter will immediately seek damages,” Musk reportedly told staff.
He said slip-ups were understandable “but breaking your word by sending detailed info to the media” about the inner workings of the company “will receive the response it deserves.”
It seems that Musk’s threat didn’t sit well with at least some staffers who shared the contents of his email.
Schiffer said she decided against sharing the leaked email “as it’s clear Twitter is doing everything it can to catch sources.”"
LOL, I mean didn't Musk himself "leak" all the communications to Taibbi and Weiss? Or could it be that Matt's big bombshell was really just a carefully selected and curated tranche of messages (possibly taken out of context) intended to prove what everyone already knew and launder Musk's image?
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
I dropped Taibbi a while ago. I'm still on his unpaid mailing list, so I get notices of his posts and I sometimes watch the "read-aloud" videos of a few of them.
As you say, he has a good line on financial scams and mainstream media. He has a good style and can be funny when he chooses, too. But then I realised what the problem is: it's nothing I don't know already, from more honest, if not as festive sources. Pam and Russ Martens are just as good on finance, and basically everyone who follows Counterpunch knows what the mainstream media is about these days. They're low-hanging fruit, so one doesn't become any wiser about them by reading Taibbi, if only they also bother to read non-mainstream left-wing sites (or even the centre-wing ones, like Moon of Alabama). It's like admiring Putin because he calls the West out in his speeches: it's easy to be right about that, even if you're wrong about basically all the rest. Like, a six-year-old could call NATO out on their shit these days, should we give Putin a medals for being blunt about it?
I think this week's clusterfuck tells you all you need to know about Taibbi: while he was lost basking in the glory of once again exposing the Bidens for being what everyone knows they are already, I didn't hear one peep from him about the most important event of the week, namely the throwing under the bus of the rail workers. (Or maybe it just didn't get in my mailbox.) Which has been the main point of discussion in Counterpunch the entire week. So much for getting his priorities right.
Fuck it, I deleted a long response about Putin/Russia/NATO/FUKUS, but wanted to say that speaking of stating the obvious, criticizing liberals and neoliberal economic policy belongs in the same category of the things you're mentioning. Like who doesn't already know that typical liberals and MMT/FIRE sector dominance aren't easy to criticize. I'm at the part of the podcast where they say Matt topped a million followers on Twitter. LMFAO. I'll never send that guy another cent.
My email notifications are on, so I'm able to rescue your response:
"You know, I wanted to revisit the part about Putin and NATO. Yes, to people like us who have been (and I'm assuming here) reading anti-Empire (proper noun intended) and left-wing critiques of the economy and neoliberalism for a long time, what he says is obvious. I also don't put any stock into the opinions of people who merely echo what Putin says and/or worship him or his words. That said, it isn't as though any other world leaders or even thought leaders are saying some of the truths he repeats about the US hegemon or NATO. I've read many machine translations of his speeches, and while of course many are full of propaganda, there isn't another world leader of his stature (and -alleged?- domestic approval ratings) who speaks as clearly and knowledgeably as he does (perhaps the same could have been said of Hitler, but I've never read any of his speeches TBH). Regardless, who else IS calling out NATO? Like who with a voice -AND- a platform? My thoughts on the Ukraine situation are complex - too complex to get into here - I'm as anti-war as you can get, but to deny that Putin (and Russia and the Douma) were provoked into this war is delusional. I just keep going back to the analogy of China staging a coup in Mexico - which they had already named to the pro-China military farm team, the states of Chihuahua and Guadalajara then demanding more autonomy in response to new right wing anti-American/English laws and roaming nazi-adjacent thugs and being shelled for 8 years because of it. What would the USA do? I'm certain the response would be far harsher than Russia's in response to the NATO-ization of NATO farm team Ukraine. I don't agree with Yasha's idea that Russia could have insisted on a peacekeeping force as this would have been viewed and sold to the western world through the Mighty Wurlitzer as Russian aggression and occupation. The rest of Europe (France, Germany, the EU and UN) clearly weren't interested in enforcing Minsk I or II and the USA and UK were busy actively arming up the Ukrainians and likely assisting their (genocidal?) campaign of terror directed at the Donbass region. I mean seriously, what SHOULD "Putin" (as though he's the monolithical decider of all Russian gov't actions?) have done? I'm not awarding him any medals and I likely wouldn't agree with most of his domestic right-wing Russian politics, but I am curious as to what any other leader in his shoes could have done? From what I gather the FUKUS/NATO favored "opposition" leader Alexy Navalny is even further to the right and more nationalistic than Putin. What are the other options?"
I'm more or less on the same footing as you are. Putin is an old-school ethnonationalist, an Orthodox choir boy whose domestic policy is basically austerity and letting the markets decide on outcomes. His foreign policy is shrewd most of the time, but in Ukraine I do think he genuinely believed himself out of options. But I do think he could've tried an embargo of energy sales to Europe (or of rocket engines and titanium to the US, for that matter) and other measures before moving for war. However, that might not have worked. There's also the fact, emphasised by Moon of Alabama's Bernhard, that in the couple days before Russia decided to invade the OCSE monitors of the ceasefire line showed an intensification of shelling coming from the Ukrainian to the separatist side, a fact mostly glossed over by the mainstream media. If we agree to his conclusion that Zelensky was preparing a major ground incursion into the LDPR side, Putin's line that Russia was trying to prevent a brutal assault against the Russian-speaking population there has at least some credence.
I have no sides in this stupid, sad war, which is causing suffering on both sides of the border among the common people, and having the arms dealers laugh all the way to the bank. But I can't say what I'd have done in Putin's place.
Yeah, I'm pretty much with you on all of that. Regarding the possibility of embargoes or refusal to trade in certain goods/commodities, I think the western corporate media would have simply continued to vilify Russia/Putin and to escalate pressure for even further sanctions, not to mention increase arms transfers to Ukraine and accelerate their ability to enter NATO officially. But yes, the stupid sad war grinds onward and drags all of us closer and closer to, if not nuclear annihilation, a large ground war in Europe and the return of fascism/nazism both there and in North America.
Totally agree - no mention of the rail strike in any article or news of the week - and I'd add Assange. Taibbi is fucking silent on Julian Assange. Like to the point of absurdity. It's like he's been "got to" and made a deal that involved him never mentioning Assange again.
Oh, and also he removed his book "I Can't Breathe" book from his profile. Hmm...I wonder why.
But yeah, I can get better Wall Street reporting at WallStreetOnParade.com or Naked Capitalism. Matt has sold out and it's pathetic.
I noticed that silence as well, altho I'm not sure what I expected. Matt's content for the last year or three has felt like a lot of oblique, weak approaches to anti-woke stuff that seems like other outlets already pretty much got on lock down since it's their sole focus, so I'm not really sure what I'm hanging around for at this point.
I am no longer a subscriber to Taibbi. He's lost me. I'm with Ames and Yasha, the former who can admit he was a right winger and knows the kind of scum involved in that ecosystem.
Good comments especially about Taibbi morphing into Horowitz, how apt. I replied to some guy on Twitter who couldn’t understand why more progressives were excited about the Twitter files. I replied maybe it was questioning the wisdom of collaborating with a right wing oligarch and a journalist who is a supporter of Israeli apartheid, as well grovelling to one of the most loathsome right wing members of Congress (Jordan). Also is it a good tactic to go all-in with one faction of the oligarchy in its efforts to take down another faction. Right away I was swarmed by what I took were Greenwald, Taibbi and Dore fanboys and girls berating me for having the audacity to question the whole sordid effort, and some implying I must be a ‘shitlib’. I think the bigger issue is how progressives are to navigate between on the one hand collaboration with social-democrats who are willing to trade incremental improvements at home in exchange for support for empire (‘the squad’ in US, Labour in Britain, NDP in Canada), and on the other hand those who recommend collaboration with the populist right with its fake anti-elitism and ultra-nationalism (showing up on Tucker Carlson, joining right wing anti-war efforts etc.). Both are bad options.
There's a whole lot to unpack there. I'm fine with Taibbi's reporting on the Twitter Files (with one key caveat, more in a bit) and I haven't read a single thing from Bari Weiss or that other dude, Shellenberg (sp?). Totally agree that cozying up with a rabid supporter of colonial apartheid Zionism isn't a good look, and it does actually hurt your credibility, thus bringing into question your real motives and genuineness. That last part brings me back to Taibbi - the one caveat I have is that so far as I've been able to tell, we still don't know whether the emails he was given were like super cherry-picked by Elon and his cronies before handing them over and thus possibly leaving out conflicting narratives and the like. Same question probably applies to the other two 'reporters' (not scare quotes, just a means of differentiating Taibbi - an actual journalist - from Weiss and what's-his-face, who are a pundit and historian, respectively I think).
But back to Taibbi again, I do think that even if the info was cherry picked, there is still enough damning evidence pointing to massive infiltration by and collusion between the USG (primarily through the 3LAs like FBI, DHS, CIA etc.) and the big social media platforms. I guess Yasha would say that anyone who expected otherwise is pretty naive and/or ignorant by this point in time. So from that angle, yeah I do see some cynicism or at least greed in Taibbi's output via the Twitter Files. Sensationalizing something that most people probably SHOULD already suspect isn't the best look either, but I still think it's important that more people know how that crap works. That said, I am disappointed in the 'progressive' reaction because it HASN'T been what I mentioned above.
It hasn't been "duh, you didn't already know that there's massive collusion between the feds/law enforcement and social media/Internet companies?" but instead it's been smears via guilt by association, minimizing/denying what has been published and/or turning it into a partisan issue thus further exploiting the big divide and making it worse when it was really a chance to come together, at least on some very basic demands that shouldn't be partisan in any way in a normal country. I.e., Can we all agree that there is improper, clandestine collusion, government-pushed censorship, infiltration and pressure put on 'information' companies and that it needs to be exposed and then kept in check no matter which of the two War Parties happens to control which part of the government? IMO the progressive response has also, whether overtly/knowingly or in the 'useful idiot' sense, only given more cover and legitimization to the process(es) and agencies who have been exposed - AND - has furthered the debunked and unhealthy narratives about Russian interference in our elections and other similar pap. "But the FBI is just trying to help keep our elections safe!" seems to be the dominant message I'm hearing from progressives(!) these days.
IOW, just because it's the Corporate Democrats being fingered in this particular case, and this gives disingenuous rightwing assholes like Tucker and Bari way too much positive exposure, doesn't mean that it isn't equally applicable the next time the Corporate Rightwing Rethugs are in power?
In many ways I'm far to the left of any of the left-leaning factions you mentioned, especially with regard to support for Empire, and I'm having trouble finding many like minded people these days. But even if Tucker is poison 90% of the time, is it a bad thing that the other 10% of the time he's spreading ostensibly anti-war messaging to his right wing followers? IMO, the main item on the overall agenda should be seriously crippling Empire and the surveillance state. If that means occasionally collaborating with political enemies, we must be very careful to be as objective as possible and to push back against the poison that constitutes 90% of their other 'work' as often as possible.
Heck, I got so lost in my thoughts I'm not even sure I addressed your comment. LOL
Thanks for taking the time to reply to my post with some really good insights. Not living in the US and watching all of this North of the border, appreciate further information and explanation from people living there to help think through this thorny issue. I do agree that any details on how the deep state colludes with social media to promote preferred government narratives is valuable in terms of public awareness, even if it sometimes comes from unsavoury sources. My only concern is when Glenn Greenwald and others start doing victory laps while at the same time ignoring how Republicans and their deep state allies do the same thing as Democrats, but in different contexts. Right now Jim Jordan and the Select Committee on the COVID pandemic is meeting, and at the same time the FBI and DoE published dubious reports on the origins of COVID which support the Republican narrative (interesting that Greenwald takes these reports at face value even though they go against the accumulated scientific evidence). As you point out Republicans are not the lesser evil despite the actions of Biden, Blinken and the rest. Both parties are equally complicit in the crimes of empire.
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.
Hi Yasha and e.pierce
I am being flippant here, but I have to admit, anyone who can write a sentence like this amuses me and gets some of my time 😉👇
"....It’s like sending an intercontinental shit-missile screaming into the dais of the White House correspondents’ dinner at 15,000 m.p.h. If you can’t see the humor in this, you probably never had a sense of humor to begin with...."
via Taibbi, discussing the Twitter Files process:
"....Two weeks later, I feel differently. In this particular instance, the story has to come out on Twitter. There’s the obvious deep irony of using the familiar drip-drip-drip format and uncontrollable virulality of Twitter to roast Twitter itself. We’re also using an inherently destabilizing medium to expose efforts to turn Twitter into an authoritarian instrument of social control. There’s genius in this. Now I would feel wrong even thinking of doing it any other way.
This is especially the case since a major subtext of the Twitter Files project is what a burn it is on conventional/corporate media, whose minions tried for years to turn Twitter into a giant conformity machine, and cheered each new advance in censorship and opinion control. Those same people now have to watch in helplessness as one horrifying revelation after another spills out, guerrilla-style, into what was not long ago their private playground. This, too, couldn’t be scripted better. It’s like sending an intercontinental shit-missile screaming into the dais of the White House correspondents’ dinner at 15,000 m.p.h. If you can’t see the humor in this, you probably never had a sense of humor to begin with...."
Source: https://www.racket.news/p/note-to-readers-on-the-twitter-files
I was unable to post this (below) yesterday, so I restarted my [web] browser, cleared the cache, and logged back in.
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Taibbi (or one of his handlers) banned me, citing the fact that some creepy [troll] had sent me a death threat in the comments section in response to my merciless counter-trolling of a variety of his asshole substack subscribers (tr0llz, b0tz, lunatics, paranoid conspiratards, leftards and general imbeciles and idiots).
Getting banned for someone else, a complete lunatic, sending me a death threat was "interesting".
I sent several emails to Taibbi and substack tech support asking if his email had been hacked, and never got a response. As soon as the twitter files thing is done, I'm unsubscribing.
One of the more epic troll/countertroll flame wars was in the comments section under Taibbi's post about Katie Halper getting fired by some Zionist media boss for daring to submit an article critical of Israeli "Apartheid".
The AIPAC/Zionist trolls were so obvious, and so hyper toxic that it was ridiculous.
I eventually compiled a list of the troll accounts and created a dedicated subtread with something like 100 (200?) links to the bizarre Zionist/AIPAC troll comments, lies, distortions, etc.
---
After something like 2 years of relentless counter trolling to get Taibbi's attention about his gross lack of taking responsibility for curating his comments section and about the need for "big" writers like him to demand that substack implement a "mute/ignore/block" function for non-admins, he did nothing (as far as I can tell).
His (or his team's) banning of me did come very soon after I said something critical of his (crappy, co-written) article about how long it was taking for the Las Vegas election count to happen.
I also got banned by Bari Weiss on her "the free press" substack for relentlessly counter-trolling some insane right trolls, paranoid conspiratards and a particularly ridiculous "left" race grifter. My guess is that most o those trolls are from the AIPAC troll farm, or some other similar troll farm (Alex Jones, Koch Bros).
Weiss (or her handlers) didn't even bother to send me an email explaining the ban (which I would have responded to same as with Taibbi, pointing out Team Weiss' abject lack of responsibility in curating her comments section, and the resulting proliferation of numerous paranoid conspiratardz, tr0llz, b0tz and complete idiots).
The Weiss ban came soon after I argued with some farcically idiotic AIPAC/Zionist troll about the use of the term "Apartheid" to describe Israeli policy toward Palestinians in the Occupied Territories.
---
Previously I got banned by Greenwald, also for relentlessly insulting a bunch of utterly retarded tr0llz in order to get Greenwald's attention about his irresponsibility in curating his comments section to get rid of the tr0llz, b0tz and idiots.
My guess is that there are some high-level toxic Zionists involved in the operation of Substack. Substack apparently does not care about the huge number of Soros trolls and other troll farm bots that proliferate in the comments sections of "big" writers.*
It is also possible, and maybe more probable that substack is just another example of tech/social media "enshittification".
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
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* note: this is more of an advertisement for F5's anti-bot products than an independent analysis, but it does appear to validate the fact that social media, including substack comments, are shit holes full of trolls, bots and lunatics.
https://www.f5.com/company/blog/bot-traffic-percentage-fake-accounts-expert
That is a great way of putting it: "enshittification" 👍
I remember reading Doctorow's "For the Win" ( https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7241373-for-the-win ) many years ago....quite fascinating IMO.
Meanwhile, I know Yasha is no fan of Taibbi....I am unfortunately cursed with the tendency to see both sides, which is why I subscribe to both 🙄
Wait I'm not quite following. Did you say you've been banned by Taibbi and Greenwald or were you excerpting someone else who did? I didn't check the Doctorow link yet.
Are. You. Daft.
????????????????
LOL. And you don't think that Yasha is smart enough to produce "content" (your word, not anyone else's) that's capable of appealing to a broader swathe of people if he really wants to get rich in so doing?
Matt was born and raised in extreme privilege by the standards of 95% of the globe's population and I seriously doubt when you're lauding him that you're talking about his work as an author of books like "The Divide" or "I Can't Breathe" and the like. But who knows, maybe I have you all wrong.
I know this is a response to a 4 month old comment, but meanness for the sake of meanness is also ugly.
Yasha is not smart enough to overcome his leftist echo chamber brainwashing, or his dysfunctional personality.
Your mindless babble proves that you are the same.
Yasha is mean, you are a meaningless blabberer.
Lol
Its a pleasure hearing the three of you talk...
“Banger” of an episode! It seems all this is more spectacle that doesn’t affect normal people. Once again we get a view into the lives of the elite instead of opportunities to better our own.
I listened to this while biking 57 miles in pouring, cold rain for over the duration of the episode. Soaked and shivering but the pod kept on. 😀
Late to this party, but really found this podcast enlightening. I always thought Taibbi's shtick might have changed as a result of starting a family, which tends to remove certain I-don't-give-a-fuck luxuries and punk angst to make the space to work towards a more financially secure legacy. This conversation definitely added a lot of context to the whole picture. A lot of it checks out. His substack work has repeatedly drawn from that 'golden age naivete' (which rings like bland old exceptionalism). I always felt cop-out energy with the 'taking a break from Useful Idiots to work on a book' - we'll see how that turns out.
"You'll be nowhere" totally feeling that. Oh "political neutering platform" I got to remember that.
That "feeding the political-entertainment complex" framing sticks, like it or not.
I find that Aaron Mate's voice is more pleasant and understandable than Taibbi's on UI.
They are both funny, but Taibbi can be a little bit more funny, at times.
The Taibbi-Kirn conversations are funnier than UI, even though Katie Halper can be very funny, usually in an understated way. Her dripping nose/kleenex schtick is precious. A pure delight.
Kirn's articles seem to be somewhat uneven, some are very good and some aren't very interesting, such as his endless laments about the horror of bourgeois tourists in Montana.
The best tourist horror I ever saw was in Andorra, on the border with Catalonia/France, watching some 30-something French mothers coming out of a MacDonalds with their kids looking completely disgusted, like they had just eaten (american) dogfood!
Hopefully some bureaucrat at the CDC will send Kirn to European tourist spots to report on the stochastic postmetaphysical scatology and PTSD side effects of american fast food consumption.
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/mission-to-america-walter-kirn/1100266354
Overview
Mason LaVerle is a young man on a mission–a mission to save his people’s way of life. Mason was raised in a tiny, isolated Montanan sect, the church of the Aboriginal Fulfilled Apostles. But the Apostles face a dwindling membership, so Mason is sent on an outreach operation to bring back converts–specifically brides. As he discovers shopping malls,
[->] fast food,
and faster women, the forces of faith and the forces of America collide, leading Mason to the brink of missionary madness.
Just ran across this article. LOL. Man Twitter and Elon Musk. What a clusterfuck. Also I listened to the RWN podcast and agreed with almost everything said about Matt Taibbi and Elon/Twitter.
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/musk-threatens-sue-twitter-employees-161222628.html
Elon Musk has reportedly given Twitter staff until 5 p.m. Saturday to respond to an email he sent and pledge not to leak internal information about the company to the media.
Journalist Zoe Schiffer of Platformer tweeted out the Musk missive which comes despite the Twitter CEO’s public push for free speech and transparency.
“This will be said only once: If you clearly and deliberately violate the NDA that you signed when you joined, you accept liability to the full extent of the law & Twitter will immediately seek damages,” Musk reportedly told staff.
He said slip-ups were understandable “but breaking your word by sending detailed info to the media” about the inner workings of the company “will receive the response it deserves.”
It seems that Musk’s threat didn’t sit well with at least some staffers who shared the contents of his email.
Schiffer said she decided against sharing the leaked email “as it’s clear Twitter is doing everything it can to catch sources.”"
LOL, I mean didn't Musk himself "leak" all the communications to Taibbi and Weiss? Or could it be that Matt's big bombshell was really just a carefully selected and curated tranche of messages (possibly taken out of context) intended to prove what everyone already knew and launder Musk's image?