Matt Taibbi gobbled by the Vampire Squid in the Vampire Castle
Matt’s political “convictions” were always tied to where the opportunity and adulation was coming from.
Lot’s of people are going nuts at just how shitty Matt Taibbi has become. People are shocked at how low one of the most celebrated investigative journalists of Gen X America has fallen — to the point that now Matt Taibbi doesn’t seem like a real person. He’s like an LLM model that was trained on Matt Taibbi writing style but has programmed to output content semantically a hybrid of Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Sarah Palin. Much of it is just braindead Reagan Era slogans with the words “fuck” and “pussy” and “moron” thrown in to give it that Gen X edge. His new devoted Substack fanbase — which now numbers in the hundred of thousands and brings him millions a year — gobbles up this stuff. And yet…there is some pushback. You can sometimes see it in the comment section. Some of his longtime fans feel that something is off now…that something happened. What exactly?
The other week, one of these complaining readers wrote to Matt, and Matt replied to them publicly in post titled “What Am I For?” He wanted to address the charge that he had somehow changed…
I do a lot of ridiculing here and don’t advocate for much. But to answer seriously: it’s strange to ask if someone is a “convert” to “fucking vicious, evil, and stupid predatory capitalism,” since it presupposes I started out as something other than a capitalist, which most Americans (including those ostensibly socialist podcasters) naturally are. I’m certainly no zealot about it, but I favor free markets, because I like the idea of people starting their own restaurant or bank or rock band or whatever and being rewarded if they do a good job, a beautiful thing when it happens. I’m not in favor of big enterprises like Goldman Sachs or GM being backstopped by the government and insulated from failure when smaller companies don’t enjoy the same privilege. I don’t think everything should be private, and do favor some relief programs to take the harder edges off a free-market system, though I think those work better when they’re universally available. I think government should be small and prioritize protecting rights and freedoms over solving the world’s problems. In short I’m what used to be called a moderate, and believe society isn’t that far from being in great shape, if we could just calm down, find fixes for a problem or two, and learn to appreciate what we have. Hope that answers your question.
In short Matt says his politics never changed — he’s always been for small government and that if capitalism is allowed to run as it should everything will be okay. I’ve read Matt here and there for years and I know this isn’t exactly true. He began his political reporting career at The eXile in Moscow — a paper where I also worked after Matt decamped for America to become a serious political reporter. And what made The eXile, which was founded by my good friend Mark Ames, infamous and different from other non-Russian newspapers operating out of Moscow was that it was firmly against the capitalist looting of Russia. That neoliberal shock doctrine, backed by the full might of the U.S. government, turned Russia into as pure expression of the capitalist as you could possibly imagine: a small government run fully by the capitalist class, fucking everyone else. This Russian experiment is quickly being replicated here in the United States, with the oligarchy vastly wealthier and more powerful and more out of control and bent on looting. Matt has little to say about the oligarchic looting of America today…and yet he was clearly against it in Russia.
Back in 2017 Matt proudly wore “RESIST” tshirts???
To get a better sense of how Matt changed, I went back to his more recent (and most famous) work — the big article he did for Rolling Stone on how Goldman Sachs is a “Vampire Squid.” And it’s interesting to see how he wrote about Goldman Sacks back when he was a rockstar progressive-liberal journalist, rather than the rockstar conservative-MAGA pundit he is today. You wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he was very much against the unbridled capitalism that Goldman Sachs represented. His focus wasn’t on how the government should be small, it was on how Goldman Sachs had effectively taken over the government — making government subservient to its interests, corrupting and gutting the regulatory state that were supposed to limit Wall Street speculation and thievery. His whole point in the article was not that the government was bad and that it should be shrunk to the size of a peanut so that a true free-market can flourish, but that the outsized power of corporations had corrupted American society — creating a system of legalized extortion, fueling a series of disastrous speculative bubbles, and robbing regular people at every turn. He wasn’t optimistic about free-markets like he is today — he was gloomy and defeatist, concluding we are run by a bunch of capitalist criminals who have turned America into a “gangster state” and who rob us at every turn.
It’s not always easy to accept the reality of what we now routinely allow these people to get away with; there’s a kind of collective denial that kicks in when a country goes through what America has gone through lately, when a people lose as much prestige and status as we have in the past few years. You can’t really register the fact that you’re no longer a citizen of a thriving first-world democracy, that you’re no longer above getting robbed in broad daylight, because like an amputee, you can still sort of feel things that are no longer there.
But this is it. This is the world we live in now. And in this world, some of us have to play by the rules, while others get a note from the principal excusing them from homework till the end of time, plus 10 billion free dollars in a paper bag to buy lunch. It’s a gangster state, running on gangster economics, and even prices can’t be trusted anymore; there are hidden taxes in every buck you pay. And maybe we can’t stop it, but we should at least know where it’s all going.
Although he doesn’t say it outright, it’s pretty clear that back then Matt was making the case for a robust regulatory government system that would keep capitalism in check and make sure markets worked for everyone. He even used the term “democratic capitalism” at one point in the article. This was a position that someone like Bernie Sanders would no doubt endorse. And Sanders and Matt had seen eye to eye before, with Sanders blurbing Matt’s book and calling him “one of the few journalists in America who speaks truth to power.” I don’t know about you but favoring government regulations seems a bit different than what Matt believes now — that the “government should be small,” a phrase that could be lifted from a policy paper put out by Charles Koch’s oligarchic-libertarian Cato Institute.
What does this switch in Matt Taibbi’s politics represent? Well to me it signals two things. There’s the issue of audience capture but also the fundamental malleability of people’s “politics.”
As I wrote before, Matt got cancelled by the libs and so he moved to the right. Well, to clarify: before he moved right he first begged the libs to take him back, blaming all the “bad things” he had written on an old friend and throwing himself to the mercy of his liberal oppressors. That didn’t work and so he moved right. The right then embraced him a way that I suspect he did not expect. His screeds against the liberals kept getting him attention, money, and adulation. And the more adulation and money he got from the right and the more he felt like an intellectual rock star in those circles, the more he moved to the right and towards a conservative-libertarian politics. It’s a classic move at this point. But this is where the malleability of people’s comes into play.
Matt wasn’t just pandering to his new audience — although the pandering was there for sure, especially at first. More than anything he was allowing the underdeveloped rightwing ideological aspect of his identity to flower…to fully blossom in the bright nourishing light of Ted Cruz and Elon Musk.
That’s right. Even when he was in the liberal cultural camp, the libertarian-conservative side was always there. You can get a glimpse of in his Vampire Squid article — with oblique references to an ideal capitalist/democratic America, a “society governed passively by free markets and free elections.” But this side of the his political-cultural identity was repressed by the liberal cultural environment in which Matt operated and on which he depended for prestige, self-worth, cultural status, and work.
The part of his career Matt doesn’t want you to remember, as hallucinated by that lying chatGPT.
Matt is a rich kid with a famous journalist father. When he entered his father’s profession and tried to make it in mainstream media, he gravitated to the progressive-liberal side of the political culture because that’s where the energy and the coolness and the opportunities were. And it worked him there. He got the Rolling Stone gig and was marketed as the direct heir to Hunter S. Thompson. He churned out articles in the progressive-liberal mold with a bit of HST-branded spunk and aggressiveness thrown in. And the liberal media establishment loved him and embraced him for it. Matt was held up as one of the most important voices of his generation. At the peak of his loving relationship with the prog-liberal side of American culture, he even wrote a BLM-inflected book about the killing of Eric Garner and police brutality — I Can’t Breathe. You could say it was peak liberalism on Matt’s part…similar to Nancy Pelosi’s bending the knee in the wake of BLM. I doubt he had any real care for the black and poor people at the gestapo end of America’s law and order system. But that’s where the liberal energy was at the time. That’s what got the attention and the praise from the liberal media and publishing industry. He got rave reviews from every liberal newspaper and magazine in America. The book marked the peak of Matt’s prog-liberal journalism and the moment of his undoing. During a national book tour, Matt was asked some uncomfortable questions about things he had written about women and everything rapidly deteriorated for him. In short order he was cancelled — banished from the liberal moral island. (You can read my definitive essay on what happened after Matt’s cancellation and the debased way he to tried to claw his way back into the liberal fold.) Banished by the libs, Matt began to develop other parts of his identity — the rightwing conservative flank of America’s cultural-political formation. This rightwing-conservative flank had always existed inside him. All it needed was the right social-professional environment to express itself.
To put it in a cruder way: Matt’s political “convictions” were always tied to where the opportunity and adulation was coming from. He’s flexible. He can be more progressive or more conservative, depending on the cultural-professional circumstances that surrounded him. If he had never been cancelled, he’d still be liberal now — writing screeds about Trump and Stephen Miller and the ICE raids and making fun of Elon Musk’s expensive combover, rather than being a Musk toady.
All that aside I don’t think Matt is uniquely corrupt. He’s corrupt in a way that a lot of people are corrupt. Most people hold many contradictory ideas and political views and moral stances in their head. We’re not rational in our beliefs and our allegiances aren’t set in stone. The way in which these ideas are expressed/suppressed and the way in which they come out as public stances on issues and political preferences…all that is based on complex social and cultural factors, rather than some hard logic or moral principles. In short, our politics are social. And Matt has been very well socialized by the MAGA right — wined and dined and made richer than ever.
—Yasha
Kind of sounds like the male version of Naomi Wolf, especially the part about how getting cancelled/embarrassed publicly sent him looking for a new home base.
It takes a certain almost disciplined kind of shamelessness to keep the pivot or refocus going after Musk humiliated him in public. grindset baby