I watched an interview with Matt Taibbi on You-Tube. I was aware of Taibbi and his reputation for independence from commonplace media thinking. I must, at some point, have read the odd piece by him but I was never a subscriber to Rolling Stone, even when it was primarily a music magazine. I may even have a few old editions of Rolling Stone in a file cabinet in the basement because of one story or another but that would be about it. I felt that I had been missing something and I was interested in Taibbi’s perspective

In any case, Taibbi was explaining to the interviewer why he now felt estranged from progressive politics and activists and he cited problems he had with the Biden administration’s alleged support for censorship on Twitter and the restrictions introduced by the administration during the COVID lockdown. More specifically, he mentioned the insistence by health authorities that COViD had likely not escaped from the Wuhan Lab or another facility. I believe he was correct to say that the Democrats laid far too much stress on Russia’s role in the 2016 election.

The interview was with Nick Gillespie on Reason TV. It struck me that the interview skewed towards support for Reason TV’s libertarian slant but what surprised me was not the things that Taibbi said but what he didn’t say. 

There is a wave of rightist media voices arguing that the Left poses a totalitarian threat and the term of art seems to be “totalitarian” rather than merely “authoritarian”. The Left is accused of fomenting violence by pointing to the authoritarianism of Donald Trump and his MAGA movement. There appears to be a calculated attempt to discourage and cow liberals and progressives from publicizing and breaking down Project 2025, written and assembled by the Heritage Foundation and by important MAGA activists. The Trump campaign is also cannily drawing back from mentioning or casting shade on its most radical positions insofar as it can until it wins the election. They are hoping voters will overlook Project 2025. 

Taibbi noted that he no longer appears on shows like Rachel Maddow’s and Laurence O’Donnell’s on MSNBC. Meanwhile, he has left Rolling Stone and now relies on subscriptions to his Substack publication, which I believe he compared to I.F. Stone’s Weekly. It seems by his account that this change has brought him a greater financial return but that was not his primary motivation in leaving Rolling Stone. 

I have no problem with the critique of mainstream media. What is, for example, MSNBC, but arguably, only the least objectionable of the American cable news outlets? Cable News is not really news. it’s a reality show aimed at a subset of the TV audience who follow the intense network coverage of developments in the political calendar, principally the 4-year cycle of presidential elections. Cable news offers news in bites but mostly it provides instant analysis and commentary about every development in the narrative it is following. It has everything to do with politics, narrowly defined, much less to do with what is happening in the polis, the place where people live and experience their lives. Inevitably, there are points in the schedule where the network departs from the norm and gives attention to broader issues and trends, to the experiences of real people. But these are mere islands in a sea of commentary and speculation because there is no money in the model for reporting such things well. Panels stretched end to end are much cheaper to put on air even though some of the participants appear to be well-compensated.

No one accuses MSNBC itself of political courage. The network dismissed Mehdi Hasan because of fear of blowback over coverage of the October 7th massacre and Israel’s response in Gaza. It’s not just the fear of public blowback for a controversial report or position. You can easily surmise that network executives fear a loss of revenue and even legal reprisals from a hostile Republican regime if Trump is elected again.

Here’s the thing, though. The people most alarmed by Trump and Trumpism and the most militant in their response appear to be the conservatives who can no longer support the Republican option, who see the party as now standing opposed to democratic practice and institutions. These people tend to see liberals and progressives as unprepared to take up the fight with the vigour, seriousness and savvy required.

Having signed up for regular reports from Matt Taibbi, I received a bulletin which suggested that the liberal-progressive media reporting of Donald Trump’s authoritarian bent was in some way responsible for the assassination attempt upon Trump Saturday. This notwithstanding that the shooter was a registered Republican and a young man reported to hold conservative views. We might actually wait a while before passing judgement on this individual’s motivations for a few days but just sayin’…And would it really explain anything even if this young man left a manifesto?

I don’t want to mischaracterize Matt Taibbi’s position on important matters. I guess I’ll have read his book Hate, Inc. and inform myself better. Without taking a deeper dive, though, it does strike me that Taibbi may have lost perspective on some important issues, most notably whether the more serious threat to democracy in the U.S. comes from the right or left. 

The libertarian protest of the government’s response to COVID in the U.S. and in Canada carries the implication, if not the express charge, that government decisions were intended to be steps towards controlling a subject population. It’s not unusual to find commentators claiming that the government response was an over-reaction and/or ineffective. Even in the discussion of the issue of closing schools, which is now widely judged to have been an error, there is little mention of the danger of children exposed to a virus which likely posed relatively small danger to themselves bringing COVID home to older members of their family. I do recall that was a concern. It’s easy to forget how concerned many people were about COVID.

The attack on expertise from the right, the elevation of “you aren’t the boss of me” to a sacred principle when the government or institutions mandate minimal public health measures like mask wearing or vaccines for employees point towards a real danger when an even more dangerous, more lethal pandemic emerges. Polarization puts the issue beyond discussion. Governments could have gone further. China, a political regime much admired by the former president, effectively quarantined much of its populace—with questionable results by all accounts. Of course, if you assert the pandemic was a plot carried out by the Deep State you maintain that the government response must be in bad faith. The question is whether response to future public health emergencies, no matter how dire, no matter how lethal, no matter how easily spread, can be left to individual choice. If you support chaos or a political vacuum you may actually prefer that the government be unable to respond to a crisis.

Government overreach is always a danger. Dealing with misinformation and targeted disinformation on social media is a problem all politicians will face now and in the future. If Taibbi wants to maintain this is an issue only with a Democratic administration he is deceiving himself. 

But I don’t want to bury the lede in this post. The bulletin I received from Matt Taibbi carried the heading, “The Slow-Motion Assassination”. In other words, in the case that Donald Trump or anyone in his cohort are threatened or assassinated, Democratic politicians and the liberal media may be held responsible because they opposed and pointed out the dangers of Trump and MAGA authoritarianism. Never mind what Trump has said, speaking of the Democrats, about “communist, marxist, fascist vermin” or that he dismissed Joe Biden as “a pile of crap” after the recent debate. Or the many suggestions by Trump and his henchmen suggesting that some kind of civil war or revolution is justified. What kind of discernment on Taibbi’s part does this represent?

I agree with the conservative anti-Trumpers who believe that the liberal and progressive, Democratic response to Trumpism is weak-kneed. If anything, the Democratic formula that January 6th should never be allowed to happen again is a piece of rhetoric, something liberals and progressives may regret repeating if faced with the necessity of wresting power back from the authoritarians. Similarly, adopting Bush era terminology and deeming the January 6th rioters to be “terrorists” rather than insurrectionists may come back to haunt them. More importantly, right now, the Democrats need to take on the Trump record and the Trump agenda squarely and loudly.

As for Matt Taibbi, he knows a lot and I’m interested in his perspective but I question the judgment of the convert. Becoming independent of assumptions you may once have held does not mean abandoning the power of observation.