The Matt Taibbi Pile-On
Are we seriously doing this? Apparently you're not allowed to speak truth to power if that particular truth only hurts one "side."
Matt Taibbi has been one of the most dogged and focused reporters on the organized campaign to censor the speech of US citizens, and admittedly he’s become one of the “stars” of substack for it. Nothing he says isn’t true. In fact, he may even understate the situation. But he’s a star because he speaks truth to actual power and does actual reporting.
But the problem with that is the following: the “power” is admittedly the uniparty, but only one half of the uniparty is overtly trying to sabotage Americans’ ability to communicate freely (the other half just seems content to hold hearings and kvetch but not to do much that’s meaninful). That’s not Taibbi’s fault. But you wouldn’t know it from the brouhaha this weekend.
In reaction to a troll,1 Taibbi wrote possibly one of the best explanations for why he focuses on the left and the Democrats. It’s worth including as a whole.
Why I don’t spend a lot of time on the Republicans:
1) There is a enormous army of MSM reporters already going after them from every angle, with most major news organizations little more than proxies for the DNC, to the point where stations hire Biden spokespeople as anchors;
2) The Republicans have very little institutional power nationally. It’s not their point of view prevailing in schools, on campuses, in newsrooms (where over 90% of working reporters vote blue), and especially in the intelligence and military apparatus, which has openly aligned itself with Democrats. Even if Donald Trump were a “threat to Democracy” he lacks the institutional pull to do much damage, which can’t be said of Democrats;
3) The Democrats’ ambitions are significantly more dangerous than those of the Republicans. From digital surveillance to censorship to making Intel and enforcement agencies central players in domestic governance — all plans being executed globally as well as in our one country — they are thinking on a much bigger and more dangerous scale than Republicans. I lived in third world countries and the endless criminal indictments of people like Trump and ongoing lawfare efforts to prevent even third party challenges are classic authoritarian symptoms. The Republicans aren’t near this kind of capability;
4) Last and most important, the Democrats are being organized around a more potent but also much dumber, more cultlike ideology. People like Yuval Harari and his Transhumanist “divinity” concept scare me a lot more than the Rs, and I was once undercover in an apocalyptic church in Texas. Ask your average Russian or Cuban what overempowered pseudo-intellectuals are capable of.
I have a pretty good record of picking dangerous phenomena ahead of time. I feel confident on this one, and that’s before we get to the demographic/class shifts in the parties.
That all sounds very reasonable, doesn’t it? It fits with what I’ve seen and experienced.
I suppose the only mistake Taibbi made was not forcefully reframing the question as apolitical, because Christmas on a cracker did the hen house blow up.
Left-leaning Independent(TM)2 media got its knickers in a bind big time.
“Taibbi” was trending on Xitter for a large chunk of the day.
There seemed to be two schools of thought.
One group was in denial. The GOP has to be just as bad.
What Matt Stoller misses is that there are two parts of the GOP. There is the establishment wing, which runs the party, and is virtually indistinguishable from their Democrat counterparts because they’re basically all serving the same masters (which, news flash, aren’t their voters). And then there’s the populist wing (MAGA, America First, whatever you want to call it). The populist wing, like populists on the left, have the entire system against them. The press crucifies them as extremists out to overthrow government because they are chistofascist nationalists,3 the institutions are what they are fighting, and they exist as a backlash against the authoritarian tendencies of the establishment as a whole, just as authentically populist leftists (such as say Jimmy Dore or Glenn Greenwald) do. The only reason that the press doesn’t go after Greenwald and Dore is that vocal liberal populists are sadly a very small club these days.4
In other words, the “MAGA” GOP are about as powerless as political institutions come, even if they make a lot of noise, and the establishment GOP, well, if you vote for them you might as well be voting for Democrats, because they’re one in the same on anything that really, really matters.
But the other group, oh, my, did they send me spinning into multiverses of torqued off that I had yet to experience.
To address this second one, I need to reiterate Taibbi’s point in my own way.
Do you want to know why I personally rarely go after the Republicans and conservatives? To put it very bluntly, they are not the ones who have disappointed me. The Democrats and the liberals are. I don’t actually think the Republicans (as separate from conservatives) will save us. They really only discovered free speech and the dangers of the intelligence agencies when both started to affect them. As for conservatives, they do conservative things. It’s pointless to judge them for that. But the liberals and the Democrats? That is a horse of an entirely different color.
Democrats were the supposed voice of liberals in this country, and liberals in this country were supposed to be about science and individual rights and thoughtful nuance and “power to the people.” They were supposed to have their eyes open about the power and risk of government and hold it to account.
And instead, well, they’ve become the opposite. They’ve found religion (literally in a way with identity politics and climate ideology) and they’ve become elitist authoritarians. And why?
Power.
Which brings us to censorship. Democrats have figured out that if you control the information people have access to, you can control a shared reality. The party that constantly screams about “saving democracy” wants to sabotage the very thing that democracy relies on to function: an informed and educated (in the best sense of the word) public.
You remember the old saying (I don’t know whom from) that “a lie can travel halfway around the globe before the truth even gets its pants on”? Censorship provides the nails to fix truth’s feet to the floor so it can’t even get out the door, and the lie has absolutely no competition.
That seems a much larger problem than a Georgia law not compensating the very few people who are “wrongly convicted.”
That’s like worrying about dirty curtains when the house is burning down.
Like worrying about a snowflake in your eye when you’re about to be buried in an avalanche.
Like being hit by a pebble when a boulder is about to roll over you.
Like worrying about a hangnail when you’re having a heart attack.
Like worrying about the person who spit in your face when the guy next to him is about to shoot you in the heart.
I can keep going but I think we all get the point.
So what is going on here?
Is Jilani stuck in false partisan dichotomy?
Was he okay with criticizing policies that mostly Democrats espoused as long as he thought it wouldn’t actually cost them the election against “Evil Orange Hitler RaCiSt Man.” Has he actually bought into the hysteria that Trump is a “unique threat”? If anyone else were at the top of the Republican ticket, would he be fine with what Taibbi is doing?
Does he actually believe one can correct the course of the Democrat Party by simply “criticizing” it rather than bringing it to its knees electorally? (I have news for him: you can’t.)
Is he worried people will bring that party to its knees? And he can’t stomach an actual reckoning for them?
Does he really not think that censoring speech on that large a scale is problematic? Is he that blind?
I honestly don’t know.
I just know that I have very little time for people anymore who underestimate the dangers of giving anyone control of information. I also know I have less time for anyone who is unwilling to burn down a party if it threatens something so vital.
I hope you all had a Happy Easter. And given that it’s still Easter Monady, enjoy a cute little gif, and tell me what you think about Zaid Jilani and his ilk, particularly the larger reluctance do anything meaningful about the Democrats’ attempts to police thought and the stringent critique of those who expose them.
I interacted with him. Trust me, he’s a troll, though not a very creative one.
Not to be confused with actual independent media.
I love that new word. It’s meaningless if you think about it for half a second, but it makes the speaker sound oh-so-erudite. It’s not as if conservatives want Hobby Lobby and Chick-fil-a to take over running of the country, which is what the term would indicate if taken seriously.
It could fit in a treehouse, a small one.
I'm with you on everything, with one exception: Dore, Greenwald et al are attacked by the establishment all the time and at the same level as Taibbi, just on different media. Look at what they tried to do to Russell Brand. As for Jilani and ilk, I can't be bothered with propagandists who are clearly there to punt for the state and provide an ideological justification for authoritarianism. How do these people live with themselves?
"Do you want to know why I personally rarely go after the Republicans and conservatives? To put it very bluntly, they are not the ones who have disappointed me."
Whereas I welcome almost any effort to destroy Republicans and conservatives, two pillars of the GOPe, or the Democrats, as you point in your own way.
It's mostly my own fault for naively believing the lie for so long, but up until John "Weepy" Boehner was exposed as an undocumented Democrat, and all too desperate to be friends with Pelosi and the first sodomite president (I had suspected the worst since W abandoned free market economics), I believed that the Republican Party stood for small government; checked government; life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; truth, justice, and the American Way.
I was a political orphan until Trump.
Democrats are now Marxists, and their pursuit of all power at all costs is to be expected - but the Republicans were supposed to be the backstop - the steel that the Marxists/Maoists encountered, except they weren't.
"I have less time for anyone who is unwilling to burn down a party if it threatens something so vital."
I want the smoke of the GOPe establishment burning to be seen for the next several generations - I want the heads of the RINOs who most facilitated the rot on stakes - John "Weepy" Boehner, Paul "Eddie Munster" Ryan, Kevin "The Beach Boy" McCarthy, Cocaine China Mitch "Buffering" McConnell.
All the rest I want hanged publicly - I want what happened to those Sioux indians in Mankato, Minnesota in 1862 to look like a dry run - then I want the stench of those cremated bodies to fill the air for twenty years because they were called to be good men:
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."
—John Stuart Mill
...but they were cowards, instead.