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.
Between the pandemic, the economic collapse, the fires and the toxic fumes, and the fact that I’m currently fighting an eviction, I know there are much more pressing issues to get worked up about these days. But as someone who got his start in journalism at The eXile and who has been on the receiving end of our “cancel culture” so many times I lost count, I can’t let it go.
This summer you probably saw Matt Taibbi lighting up the Internet with his moral crusade against America’s “cancel culture.” He’s been praised by bluechecks on the left, the center, the right, and the alt-right for having the courage to go against the grain and to “tell it like it is” — courage, I’d like to point out, he seems to have discovered only after a bunch of celebrity centrists got together (to widespread acclaim) to wage a coordinated insurgency against cancel culture in the pages of respected establishment pubs like Harpers, New York Mag, and the New York Times.
We can talk about the strength of Matt’s arguments and his rhetorical skills, and maybe I’ll get into it in greater detail later. But if you ask me, his constant sucking up to gross establishment pundits, his constant cliches, his angry dad takes snarling about “kids these days” and how everything was better and purer back in the 1960s, and his rants about the glorious Rational Enlightenment threatened by the dastardly radical left — it’s all been very embarrassing. Matt went from helping set up what is probably the most radical and avant-garde American literary experiment of his generation to sounding like a caricature of a reactionary boomer, all this at the tender age of 50.
I mean, just look at how Matt talks about cancel culture with that alt-right weirdo Bret Weinstein. Dialing in from his office, which is decked out with a cool drum kit and framed Rolling Stone covers, Matt explains that cancel culture is actually a Bolshevik-like bacillus. It’s infecting our institutions! We gotta get it out!
I think because people just don't know recognize how serious it is. Again it’s similar to what happened in Russian history — people thought that this little clan of you know super-motivated Bolsheviks were never going to go anywhere because even within the relatively small minority of socialists who were very active they were considered nuts. But they had a way of thinking that was very difficult to counter in an institutional setting. This is kind of a similar thing I think and people are seeing this that once this gets into an institution it's just really difficult to oppose.
B-B-Bolsheviks? That’s what things like that New York Times Tom Cotton op-ed “cancellation” event are all about? It makes no sense. Hell, Matt doesn’t even get his basic Russian history right.
But, like I said, I want to put aside issues of substance and style for now and get at something that is a lot more basic — something about Matt that everyone seems to have forgotten.
Matt might be full of zest and anti-cancel courage now, when most of America’s establishment is already fighting the same fight right there along with him. But when taking a stand against politicized smear campaigns and cancel culture actually mattered — when it affected him and those around him personally — he didn’t stand on principle nor did he fight the cancel mob.
What Matt did do was this: he lied, blamed someone else for things that he actually did, and then tried to get someone else cancelled instead of him. That’s what Matt doesn’t want you to remember: Not that long ago, he took part in cancel culture — all in an attempt to save his own skin.
To understand what I’m talking about, you gotta go back to 2017.
That year, Matt was on the receiving end of a nasty online smear campaign in which he was painted as a rapist and a dangerous sexual harasser. The smears were total bullshit. They were based on some highly decontextualized satire that he and Mark Ames put out when they were editing The eXile, a cult satirical newspaper that they ran back in Moscow in the 1990s and early 2000s.
The smears had no basis in fact. But that didn’t really matter. The campaign was being whipped up by a bunch of Democratic Party hacks and activists, and their suggestible dupes still reeling from the shock of Trump’s victory. They had been hating on Matt because of his skeptical reporting on Russiagate and on the Dem party’s cynical embrace of xenophobia and conspiracy mongering as a way of deflecting blame for Hillary Clinton’s spectacular failure in 2016. Matt had a big audience and a lot of credibility — probably the most mainstream credibility of any Russiagate critic. He was effective and people listened to him, and the Dem Party nomenklatura absolutely hated him for it.
The stuff that they were hurling at Matt on Twitter and on Reddit was gross and ugly, and downright libelous. I remember it all very well. In fact, I defended him at the time, and was myself attacked because of it — called a rapist apologist and worse. My book Surveillance Valley was about to come out then and I knew that coming to his defense could easily get me and my book cancelled, but I did so anyway. I did it on principle and in solidarity — even though I barely knew Matt personally.
This campaign against Matt kept circulating for months. Then, in October 2017, just when Matt’s new book was getting a lot of good press and he went on a book tour, the smears got ramped up — and that’s when they finally hit their target. His book tour was scrapped, a popular podcast he had just started running with a former Gawker got canned. Matt managed to hold on to his job at Rolling Stone, but other than that he turned into an untouchable ghoul. It was brutal to watch how quickly so many of his colleagues turned their backs on him publicly.
Reuters, October 2017
The ridiculous thing about it is that, despite all the articles accusing Matt of sexual harassment, no one had actually bothered to do any real reporting on these “accusations.” Journalists had simply recycled the same few offending screengrabs from Mark and Matt’s own satirical writing. If they had done the reporting, they would’ve discovered that there were no accusations, nor were there any actual accusers. They didn’t exist, as subsequent reporting by Walker Bragman has demonstrated. Well, maybe one victim did exist: New York Times journalist Michael Wines, who at the time was based in Moscow and who Matt had tagged in the face with a horse sperm pie back in 2001 for being a reactionary hack whose final offense was writing puff pieces on Putin and his KGB background. I guess getting horse sperm squished all over your face could technically count as a kind of sexual harassment?
I repeat: there was never a victim or an accuser — there was only the satirical material, cartoonishly offensive at times, as everyone expected of The eXile back when it was written, and only years later and taken out of context and weaponized against the authors. The attacks against Matt were so blatantly dishonest, failing to follow even basic J-school source-checking, that, if you look at those same articles today, you’ll see that a good number of them have already been corrected to remove any reference to these supposed harassment charges — including outlets like Newsweek, The Nation, and the Guardian.
As Mark Ames explained at the peak of smear campaign back in 2017, these “accusations” came from his own writing — over-to-top satire that was meant to be as offensive as possible: “It is not true that The eXile work was not satirical,” he wrote. “All of those ‘accusations’ come from me. They come from my own satirical work. I’m the self-accuser, the only accuser — as absurd and meta as this is.”
And then he tried to put The eXile’s purposefully offensive satire into context:
The eXile was produced in a very different world and context, Boris Yeltsin’s Russia of the 1990s, when virtuous neoliberals oversaw and ran propaganda cover for one of the most horrific and disastrous experiments on a country in modern times. Millions of Russians went to their graves early in the 1990s; it was the complete degradation of a people and region. We covered the story in the opposite way that everyone else around us did — satirical rather than “objective”. The Clinton missionaries propagandizing for Yeltsin were publicly virtuous while lying and looting and laying waste. So we were publicly grotesque immoral idiots, but we got the story right. The dominant metaphors for the American colonial project in Russia were rape and prostitution; we took those metaphors as fundamental to what was really going on, and tried to make our readers as uncomfortable as possible. We approached this shocking appalling reality — with a shocking offensive satirical aesthetic.
I’ll admit that it’s probably very hard for someone in today’s America to understand the type of satire that Mark is trying to explain here — without being there in Russia at the time and experiencing that world directly.
I remember first reading The eXile back when I was a college kid in Berkeley around 2001 or 2002 — and it totally blew my mind.
I had emigrated to America with my family from the Soviet Union in 1989, right before the whole thing came crashing down. We knew it was bad. My uncle and aunt and a bunch of cousins and a few other distant pockets of family still lived there. My parents kept in constant touch with them and sent them money. We knew that the new Russia was poor, collapsing, full of crime, and corruption, and that people were struggling just to survive. One of my cousins, a single mother with a young kid, desperately wanted to get out. She did what countless desperate Russian women did at the time: she signed up for one of those mail order bride services — a form of soft, socially acceptable prostitution and sex trafficking — and married a poor public school wood shop teacher in Connecticut. He was a nice guy, but couldn’t get a woman in his own society. Lucky for him, even a poor American loser had the resources to pick a Russian woman out of catalogue. For my cousin, the trade was obvious: sex and life with a guy you don’t really like in return for a life in America and material support. But in the end, he got more than he bargained for. Not only did my cousin move in with him, but so did her young son, and her parents. The poor guy got the whole package!
So I knew things were bad in Russia, but I never really thought about this stuff too deeply or carefully. I was still too young and had my own immigrant issues to deal with in America. What was happening back in the old country, it seemed too far away from me to care. When I did start thinking about it and started reading The eXile at the recommendation of my Russian buddy, it blew me away.
The eXile described a bleak and horrific landscape: a rapacious oligarchy, looting and criminality on an industrial scale, starvation and exploitation, utter poverty everywhere you looked, and over it all — a band of corrupt western politicians, journalists, and experts whitewashing and cheering the horror as a beautiful thing. And parallel to it all was debauchery and sexual exploitation on an epic scale: a city flooded with western advisors, con men, failures, and NGO hacks who treated Russia and its people — and particularly its women — as spoils to be ravaged, enjoyed, and thrown in the trash. I didn’t quite get that a lot of the material was satirical. And I sure didn’t know what to make of the world The eXile depicted. This wasn’t the Russia that I read about in the news or heard about through the Soviet immigrant grapevine. No one I knew talked about it this way. It was like reading Sade. I was titillated and disgusted. No way could this world be real.
Well, as I found when I went back to Russia a few years later, it was real.