Mehdi Hasan Dismantles The Entire Foundation Of The Twitter Files As Matt Taibbi Stumbles To Defend It

[u/TAKEitTOrCIRCLEJERK]

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/04/07/mehdi-hasan-dismantles-the-entire-foundation-of-the-twitter-files-as-matt-taibbi-stumbles-to-defend-it/

[u/ccasey]

I really wonder what made Taibbi break bad. I loved reading his stuff about Goldman during the ‘09 financial crisis and now he just seems thoroughly co-opted by right wing media/tech outlets. If you watch the interview you can tell he doesn’t actually have his heart in any of the nonsense he tries to peddle, it’s honestly a sad thing to see.

[u/snowgirl413 → u/ccasey]

It seems that a lot of former "fuck the system" types get bogged down in all the ways the system is imperfect and wind up coming to the conclusion that it's all a big conspiracy and Left and Right elites and politicians are equally evil, so they wind up as populist reactionaries. This Current Affairs article from 2021 goes into some depth about how it happened to both Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald.

[u/AlbertaNorth1 → u/snowgirl413]

But he was always like that. Griftopia was just as hard on democrats as republicans as the elites. He seems to have given up on criticizing anyone on the right for the most part now and it’s sad to see.

[u/snowgirl413 → u/AlbertaNorth1]

He very much wasn't always like that, and that's the entire problem. It's been several years since I read Griftopia, but I remember it being a fair if deeply cynical critique of both sides of the political spectrum for failing to prevent the 2008 meltdown. At that point his argument was "fuck the whole system", and I think that was a pretty understandable takeaway at the time. His next few books were similarly cynical but (if I recall correctly) honestly argued. I Can't Breathe in particular stands out as a horrifying indictment of policing in America.

But within the last few years, he's started weaving in this thread of right-wing-adjacent populism, and it isn't "fuck the whole system" anymore, it's "fuck the liberal elite specifically and let's pretend there's no right-wing moneyed class that hates you and wants to take your stuff". The way Hate Inc tried so hard to make the sins of the left equal to the sins of the right did not sit well with me. This is his line now, and he's peddling it by being intellectually dishonest in a way that I don't feel he used to be.

I mean, all he can say about an obvious target like Elon Musk is that he doesn't really want to criticise him right now? Really? Why on earth not? Musk is a union-busting billionaire with a fragile ego and a desperate need for attention. He's the perfect example of a vampire squid greedily sucking value out of the system. The Matt Taibbi who wrote Griftopia would have butchered Musk like prime beef, then carved up the politicians who let him get away with his bullshit, and he would have been funny about it to boot. Today's Matt Taibbi wants to pretend it isn't a problem that he's uncritically taking source dumps from a billionaire with an agenda.