Matt Taibbi Went From Raging Against the Machine To Pandering to It

Taibbi once inspired me to go into journalism. Now he's an example of what's wrong with it.

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Years ago, I was just a puppy at the University of Georgia (Go Dawgs), trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life. Then I became infatuated with the columns of a then-obscure writer named Matt Taibbi.

Taibbi was part of a crop of what have come to be known as “Gonzo journalists,” reporters who blended their reporting with first-person missives that aimed to make you feel what they were feeling as they described a scene or interviewed a big personality.

The son of a journalist, Taibbi refused to take the easy way out by jumping through nepotistic hoops. Instead, he beat his own path, eventually arriving in Russia to work at a gonzo indie publication called The Exile.

While there, Taibbi and a group of American expats wrote stories you wouldn’t see anywhere else — diving deep into Russian culture and politics in an irreverent way that was guaranteed to earn them more enemies than any American journalist writing suck up hagiographies in mainstream media back here in the States could develop during their lifetimes.

A lot of it was juvenile, no doubt, but it was juvenile in a daring way. Taibbi was taking risks by alienating everyone from criminal organizations to governments to legacy media by not only writing critically of these entities but confronting them face to face. In one particularly shocking piece, he smacked the New York Times Moscow bureau chief in the face with a horse semen pie and wrote an accompanying article that was over 7,000 words. The bureau chief’s crime? Being too sympathetic to American foreign policy, which Taibbi viewed as vicious and imperialist in nature.

Living and writing in Russia and pulling off a mixture of daring and utterly crazy feats like that rendered Taibbi fearless. When he returned to the United States, he brought this fearlessness with him kind of like I use hot sauce, liberally splashing it on everything he wrote.

My early favorite collection of writings of his was called Spanking The Donkey: Dispatches From The Dumb Season, where he covered the 2004 Democratic presidential primary and wider general election season.

Taibbi’s opinion on the matter was that the Democratic candidates were basically a joke: unfit to challenge George W. Bush and unfit to run the country. Americans agreed — Bush won that election.

But it was how Taibbi skewered our media and political class on both sides that made the book such a worthwhile read. He was furious, for instance, at how reporters had bent over for Bush’s war in Iraq. Here’s one passage from the book about a press conference that particularly disgusted him:

After watching George W. Bush’s press conference last Thursday night, I’m more convinced than ever: The entire White House press corps should be herded into a cargo plane, flown to an altitude of 30,000 feet, and pushed out, kicking and screaming, over the North Atlantic.

It was rude, and kind of murderous, but it was also cathartic. Taibbi, like the rest of us who were war opponents, watched the collective press corps defenestrate itself as part of the administration’s campaign to sell a completely pointless conflict. And he was one of the few people in the press, albeit on the edges of it, who was willing to say that this was fundamentally evil and that something is badly broken in the relationship between the media and government.

He also brought his Russian hijinks to our shores, pulling stunts like interviewing the former director of the Office of Drug Control Policy while dropping acid while wearing a Viking costume.

But when the financial crisis hit, Taibbi started to develop a more serious reputation as a reporter who could help Americans understand the peril that had befallen us. He wrote heavy-hitting pieces for Rolling Stone and books that deciphered the ins and outs of Wall Street’s misdeeds. He famously called the investment bank Goldman Sachs a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

Taibbi began to turn his eyes more and more towards the two-tier system of justice we have in this country: one for the ultra-rich and one for the rest of us. He wrote lengthy books about the criminal justice system and the war on drugs. Gradually, the ad hominems dropped out of his writing, and his tone became more and more serious. He was well on his way to transforming from gadfly journalist to the next I.F. Stone.

Then the Great Awokening happened. The Summer of 2020 hit, and much of the country lost its mind, declaring anything and everything racist, from your neighbor’s dog to our national parks.

Taibbi was one of the few left-leaning journalists who stood up to this wave of racialism that briefly enveloped seemingly every institution in the country. When so much of the media was gushing over simplistic tripe like Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, Taibbi was picking it apart:

DiAngelo isn’t the first person to make a buck pushing tricked-up pseudo-intellectual horseshit as corporate wisdom, but she might be the first to do it selling Hitlerian race theory. White Fragility has a simple message: there is no such thing as a universal human experience, and we are defined not by our individual personalities or moral choices, but only by our racial category.

It wasn’t that different from what I was saying at the time (I’m pretty sure I knew every person who was pushing back during this period on a first name basis), but it was important for Taibbi to join me because 1) He is a fantastic writer 2) He spent his life on the left, so he had an audience that needed to hear the message most of all.

At the time, I was overjoyed that Taibbi had joined me in the trenches. The political left had spent my lifetime arguing for colorblind diversity — that our race and ethnicity isn’t what defines us, our character is. And the Great Awokening sought to undo all that. While Taibbi started to get barbs that was pivoting to the right, I viewed him as standing by the very progressive principles he had always believed in.

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But over the past year, my faith in Taibbi started to falter. I noticed that he had grown increasingly obsessed with criticizing Democrats and the left, almost never castigating the political right at all. Finally, in the spring of 2024, he wrote a lengthy Substack Notes piece explaining that he had decided to mostly ignore the Republican Party, which is most easily reproduced here by April Harding on X:

Source: April Harding on X.

This was a huge departure for Taibbi. I had always adored his writing because, despite having left-leaning views, he had a copious amount of scorn for both major political parties.

And at the time he wrote this, Republicans controlled the Congress, most of America’s state legislatures, and the Supreme Court. How was that “little institutional power” nationally?

While the GOP didn’t have the White House and executive branch at the time, that changed nine months later after Trump once again took control of the federal government. Yet with rare exceptions, Taibbi continues to be fixated on Democrats and liberals, who now hold far less power in the halls of governance than the Republicans do.

What’s happening here? I can’t reach into Taibbi’s mind and see his soul. But in conversations I’ve had with him over the years, I know that he was taken aback by the success he’s had on this Substack platform. He is making more money than he ever has before, and unlike traditional media, Substack is built entirely around subscribers, not advertisers. Your readers are your retirement, and you’d better not anger them too much.

(I lose paid subscribers regularly, if you think that’s wrong, consider subscribing! If not, well, my other hobbies are guitar and stand-up comedy, I think I’m a professional starving artist.)

Glancing at the most popular posts on Taibbi’s publication Racket News, almost every single one is skewering Democrats or the liberal media — even at a time when Republicans hold all the governing power.

This isn’t to say that Taibbi doesn’t occasionally dissent from his readership. The other day, he sent out a rare Tweet criticizing Trump, calling it “fucking stupid” to write an executive order intended to punish flag burning. But maybe the vociferous pushback he got from his audience online is part of the reason why he was soon back to his comfortable posting about how all the problems of the world rest at the feet of the political left.

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Photo by Ash Hayes on Unsplash

I found a recent post particularly galling because of how discordant it has been with Taibbi’s long-held beliefs. After a gushing article praising Bari Weiss for her elevation to mainstream media fixer, he took umbrage at those who criticized him for siding with a corporate media behemoth — the very people he spent years and years castigating. He zoomed in on the critics’ views on the Israel-Palestine conflict, arguing that backers of Israeli policy are simply more open-minded and argue in good faith:

Israel supporters will argue with you. They will get defensive on days like today and lecture you about the history leading up to their decision. American advocates for Palestine don’t bother arguing. Since they don’t admit the possibility of honest disagreement, they move straight to the corrupt reasons you must have for failing to already embrace their view: payoffs, blackmail, cowardice, or submission to the Great Jewish Conspiracy. That once-forbidden last idea they suggest with the giddiness of teenagers who’ve just discovered oral sex.

This is an astounding paragraph from a man who once hit the New York Times Moscow bureau chief in the face with a horse sperm pie because he felt he was too sympathetic to American foreign policy.

Taibbi’s interpretation of political reality in the United States seems to revolve entirely around his mentions on Twitter and the adulating praise he gets from his right-wing subscribers and commenters. Yes, there’s all kinds of annoying content on Twitter — from both sides of the Middle East dispute, by the way. What Taibbi is actually describing is just a familiar dynamic. The people who agree with you on any issue are always nicer to you than the people who don’t. Let’s not pretend that by accusing Americans who sympathize with Palestinians of antisemitism that Taibbi is not siding against them.

But if you step outside and touch grass, you might notice that Congress has held at least nine hearings targeting institutions it views as insufficiently supportive of Israel and zero hearings about anti-Arab or anti-Palestinian hate; that the Trump administration is trying to deport legal immigrants exclusively because they criticized Israel and no other countries; that states around the country have laws that punish people for boycotting Israel or even just Israeli settlements; that countless people including even Hollywood actors have been fired for vocally opposing Israeli war crimes; that Members of Congress wanted to ban TikTok because they think too many young people are trash talking Israel on the platform; that virtually anyone who opposes any aspect of Israeli policy is quickly called antisemitic by a cornucopia of influential organizations like the ADL, AIPAC, and AJC; that the administration is trying to cut off funding for basics like research to universities who refuse to impose their own speech codes restricting criticism of Israel; and even his new friend Weiss has her own version of the Great Jewish Conspiracy — the idea that people in this country are opposing the horror in Gaza because “Qatar Bought America.” That’s right, Sheik Al-Thani is all the talk among Gen Z.

For a guy who has made his name around defending free speech since the Great Awokening, he seems awfully unbothered that the government in the United States is willing to move Heaven and Earth to restrict Americans’ God-given write to criticize a foreign country.

In the above post, Taibbi also explains that the reason he doesn’t spend much time on this is because he simply doesn’t know that much about it. It’s not that interesting to him, so why waste time on it, right?

“It was once considered a virtue in journalism to decline to answer a question if you don’t know what you’re talking about,” he writes. “I explained…that Gaza wasn’t a subject that I had ever covered.”

Let’s put aside his whitewashing of the behavior of the Israel lobby in the United States for a second. In a vacuum, that would be a perfectly reasonable statement. There are issues I don’t understand very well like climate change that I rarely write about it for exactly that reason. We shouldn’t ask everyone to be an expert on everything.

But is it actually true that Taibbi just doesn’t have any history of writing about the Palestinians?

That would be news to…Taibbi. In 2001, he penned an excellent article for the Exile called “Far Gone in 30 Seconds: CNN Sentences Palestine To Death.” In the piece, Taibbi dissects a brief CNN segment about a group of Palestinians celebrating the 9/11 attacks.

Despite the raw feelings Americans had following the horror of the attacks, Taibbi felt he had a moral responsibility to provide broader context.

“CNN had a responsibility— particularly given the extreme gravity of the situation— to provide an exact context for the footage it was showing,” he wrote. “The man handing over the piece of pie— why was he smiling? Who was he handing the pie to? The implication was obvious: this Palestinian was so happy about the bombings, he was giving pie away to strangers.”

He pointed out that many Palestinians held a candlelight vigil for the American victims of the attack. Palestinian schoolchildren held moments of silence to sympathize with America. Yasser Arafat donated blood.

“CNN’s decision not to show these reasoned responses underscores the anti-intellectual nature of television news— and its ability to influence people in an anti-intellectual direction,” Taibbi wisely wrote. “A sudden outburst of emotion simply makes for better and more powerful television than a reasoned response. Conflict looks better on television than peace. The focus on this side of humanity (particularly when covering foreign peoples, who are more easily dehumanized) produces in viewers the habit of believing that emotional responses are more valid than reasoned ones.”

Then Taibbi went further, offering historical context that CNN didn’t:

During the entire first day of coverage, CNN never once broached the question of what might have aroused Arab anger toward the United States. The station speculated endlessly that Osama bin Laden was the culprit, but it never once bothered to ask what might have been bin Laden’s motive. The same held true for the shots of the celebrating Palestinians. No reason was offered. Instead, the station simply asked for Americans to rely on their own preconceived notions of Islam to form the motive for their behavior. The groundwork for that appeal has been steadily laid over the course of the last three decades— since about the time of the formation of O.P.E.C., incidentally.

Taibbi had a different view than the one blasted out to Americans in the weeks following the 9/11 attacks:

Palestinians have a very simple reason to hate Americans. Americans are supporting the occupation of their country by Israel. Israeli armed forces, the same people who are bulldozing neighborhoods and shooting into crowds, use American weapons— even American missiles. The United States is basically a colonial aggressor to most Palestinians, some 360,000 of which are living as refugees in Lebanon.

His kicker offered a broader critique of how the American media treats the Middle East:

American coverage of the Middle East works the same way. You cover an Arab-Israeli conflict for years, following a certain storyline. Along the way, you lie to your viewers about what’s really happening, setting them up to think that America’s position in the Middle East is reasonable. Then something like the bombing happens, and you show Palestinians dancing in the streets. Americans then, quite naturally, go completely crazy with rage and demand total retaliation. […]

Probably no single film clip in recent history has had as much of an impact as the Palestine clip. Summing it up one way was Ehud Sprinzak, an Israeli expert on terrorism, who was quoted in Reuters, referring to the clip:

“From the perspective of Jews, it is the most important public relations act ever committed in our favor.”

Put it another way: in the 48 hours after the clip ran, Israelis shot and killed 13 Palestinians in the Jenin area of the West Bank.

Thirty seconds was all that took. Forget about anyone ever being reasonable when this is the way our leading journalists work.

Of course, this was over 20 years ago. A man can change his mind.

But it took an enormous amount of bravery to write these words as the rubble of the Twin Towers had yet to be cleared. It demonstrated that Taibbi had no intention of pandering to an audience to get ahead in media. He was simply looking at a situation and telling people what believed was true. That was the journalist whose writing I fell in love with.

And there were flashes of this Taibbi in later years. In 2019, he featured journalist Abby Martin on his Rolling Stone podcast co-hosted with Katie Halper. Martin produced the 2019 documentary “Gaza Fights for Freedom,” which is about a series of protests Gazans took part in against the Israeli occupation in 2018.

Although Halper, a Jewish woman who has long been interested in Palestinian rights, did much of the talking, Taibbi, too, was transfixed by the documentary.

“You have footage where people are gasping, it’s so graphic,” he told Martin, complimenting her on getting footage of Palestinian protesters being hit with gas weapons by Israeli soldiers.

He compared the film to Hearts and Minds, the Vietnam-era documentary that excoriated the U.S. war in Indochina, praising her for juxtaposing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s callous words with “horrific, graphic violence.”

He dissected the Israeli media strategy for justifying attacks against civilians, pointing to the 2010 Gaza flotilla, where a group of activists tried to break the long-running Israeli siege of the territory:

There’s this technique they use with the press, where unnamed sources, like usually military intelligence sources will say something…bad is going to happen….oh they’re going to load up boats with sulfur and explosives. The whole sort of prep for the idea they’re going to do something bad.

So when the reaction happens, everyone’s like oh well, it’s all reasonable. It seems like that’s a pattern that happens there over and over again. They kind of seed the press with this idea, right? And then it raises the expectations and therefore they have to be shot, or whatever it is.

A frequent theme of the episode was that the American media is willing to talk honestly about atrocities in Syria but not what’s happening to the Palestinians.

“It’s worthy and unworthy victims, that whole thing. Syria, those are victims we can talk about them. This we can’t talk about,” Taibbi said.

If Taibbi is suddenly of the belief that Palestinians are unworthy victims, it would mark a sudden shift in the thinking of a man who spent his life criticizing not only American foreign policy more broadly but specifically criticizing the American media for how it helps justify hatred of and attacks on Palestinians.

But my guess is this isn’t about Israel or the Palestinians at all to Taibbi.

For most of his life, he was out there in the wilderness (sometimes, literally, he played professional basketball in Mongolia). He was raging against the Machine, whether that machine was the American media, both Democratic and Republican governments and politicians, or vicious foreign governments like the one that that runs Israel right now.

Over the past few years, his writing has become unrecognizable to longtime fans like me because he seems to have become something he never was before: comfortable. It’s easy to continue to push out pablum that appeals to his partisan readers, who I suspect are increasingly the only audience he has.

If that means ending his long campaign of holding elites accountable and now pandering to them instead, so be it. After all, so many other media figures have been audience captured by partisan readers and donors. What makes Taibbi above that? He’s still a man, and all men err.

It’s just a shame that a man I once admired so much decided to go from being the solution to being the problem.