Posted by RaskolnikovX on March 15, 2025, 11:02 am
Not sure I posted this before or not so I'll do it again.
There was a recent post on this topic and this is the book and audio book version of the relevant book. I've been listening to it for a while and regardless of the stuff on Taibbi/Greenwald there is a lot of very useful information on the tech oligarchs (laminated faced cunt, Thiel, Ellison and the rest.
and it's very mixed. There's a lot of personal axe-grinding and quite a lot of it can be seen as a mainstream attack on the media channels that are taking their readers/listeners. There are a lot of moments that made me rail against the author rather than his targets.
There's also some ridiculously gentle treatment of people like Taylor fucking Lorenz, who gets treated like she's some kind of crusading journalist. Bari Weiss gets (rightly) slammed but the partiality is clear. AOC also gets glazed in the brief mention she gets.
However, there's plenty of legitimate criticism of the tech oligarchs and of both Greenwald and Taibbi, particularly the latter. His apparent dismissal of the campus protests (re: Gaza) as not being something Universities should be doing was the first I'd heard of it. I'm going to track down the original source to check whether it's true or Higgins has just framed it in a dishonest way.
In summary, mixed but a fairly short read that can provoke a lot of criticism of the write but also the targets.The corporate media are complicit in the Gaza genocide. Never forget what they did. Never forgive them for it.
although the clip of Taibbi is suspiciously short and that it makes you wonder whether it hasn't been taken out of context.
However, he appears an that sub-Fox hate channel all the time so probably not. I could not imagine hearing the shit that the now press secretary spews out of her rip and Taibbi not pushing back a few years ago. Now he just gives a short, confirmatory quote.
Bad. Really bad.
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The corporate media are complicit in the Gaza genocide. Never forget what they did. Never forgive them for it.
Thanks for the heads-up .. and wow .. Taibbi sold out
I've stocked up recently on my reading material, so it'll be a while until I get to it ..
On Taibbi .. I think he was one writer in Rolling Stone I noticed way back in the noughties. It's stupefying how he has turned on a dime. Does Katie Helper or Mate make any mention of this?
Thanks for the book review & further digging on Taibbi. Agreed that was a dreadful performance from him in the interview given the full pelt propaganda & lies coming from the other two. The 'universities shouldn't be in the business of politics' line he takes is a complete cop out, and felt like he was reaching for the one bland generalisation he could offer without agreeing with what the others were saying, but not causing the kind of offence that would mean he wasn't invited back.
A search of his twitter for 'gaza' shows him falling back on the 'it's complicated' excuse, pleading ignorance and saying that he didn't want to take a stance out of wanting to be 'careful'. Otherwise it sounds like he's covered Israel/Palestine from the angle of social media censorship but hasn't apparently expressed opposition to the genocide since Oct 7th:
Transcript - America This Week, May 3, 2024: Gaza, Columbia, and More, in "I&P" Walter and Matt finally talk about a long-avoided subject. Plus, John Updike's "A&P"
Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn May 04, 2024
Matt Taibbi: All right. Welcome to America This Week. I’m Matt Taibbi.
Walter Kirn: And I’m Walter Kirn.
Matt Taibbi: All right, so we’re going to dive into our favorite subject, Israel and Palestine and the protests here in the States, and a number of things that have happened in rapid succession that are alarming, including a bill that just passed in Congress that seems remarkable on many levels. But maybe we should just start with the whole question of why we haven’t talked about this bill so much or this issue so much in the past. Do you want to start? I’m happy to go there, but...
Walter Kirn: Well, yeah. I’ll-
Matt Taibbi: I think we feel similarly. Yeah.
Walter Kirn: Yeah. I’ll let you start.
Matt Taibbi: Okay. So, I’ve seen a lot of criticism. I’ve seen people going after me online and on social media talking about how I must be afraid, even as an independent, to talk about this issue, because I’m afraid of Israel. Like, are you kidding? Fuck Israel. I’m not afraid to talk about any issue. And then there’s a secondary thing that comes after that where people think, “Well, it must be a financial motivation. You make money from subscribers, you’re afraid to offend X number of people who subscribe to you, so you don’t want to talk about the issue and on this issue, you’re going to lose some people who feel very strongly about it no matter what your opinion is.” But that’s not really true either. For somebody like me, the way you lose financially in commentary, as well as journalism, is to be wrong about something.
Walter Kirn: Correct.
Matt Taibbi: And the big reason that I don’t talk about Israel and Palestine is because I don’t fully understand it. I can react emotionally to seeing the bombing of civilians, as well as the terrorist attacks, but there’s a hundred years of history, there’s a million moving parts. There are things that have happened in the last 20 years, efforts to construct a two-state solution that have failed, the introduction of Hamas as a player into all this. There’s just tons of background that I don’t know, I don’t feel on solid ground talking about a lot of these things. So, it’s just not something that I willy-nilly feel like diving into. This job is about being careful with words. And so when I have something I feel confident in saying, I’ll say it. That’s the reason that I don’t like this issue.
That, and there’s another element to the story which I think is unique, which is that the people on both sides of this issue, I don’t like the way either of them talk about the other. And there is an emotional tenor to this entire affair that makes it difficult to even ask questions without people accusing you of being on the wrong side, and I don’t like that. And we’re going to get into some of that, because we’re going to talk about what’s happened with the protests here in the States. And you can see how the attitudes around debating this issue have turned in a dark direction all around, and that has made me nervous. I’ve been assigned to cover this story a couple of times and have always been leery of the way activists involved with this issue talk about it. And so it makes me uncomfortable. I don’t feel confident about the history. I’ve never been there. So that’s part of it for me. But Walter, how about you?
Walter Kirn: Well, first of all, the show is called America This Week, not Israel this week. But I think we’ve decided to cover this, because that has come home to America with these protests.
Matt Taibbi: Absolutely.
Walter Kirn: So I think it’s appropriate. But like you, I’ve never been to Israel. I’ve never been to Gaza. I don’t consider myself a student of the conflict, though it’s been going on in the background all my life. I’ve been aware of it in some form or another, not necessarily the Gaza conflict, but Israel’s wars with its neighbors. To make a confession, or just a simple acknowledgement of personal history, I grew up in the ‘70s at a time when Israel was under siege and was quite celebrated in the American press as a holdout against regional terrorism and so on. Terrorism, as I knew it before the 9/11 style was the hijacking of planes-
Matt Taibbi: Right, Munich. Yeah.
Walter Kirn: ... and Munich, the PLO killing athletes.
Matt Taibbi: Black September.
Walter Kirn: Exactly. So, I will freely acknowledge that I was predisposed to the Israeli side of this argument as a young man. I’ve tried to educate myself, as time has gone on, but not sufficiently to have real clear beliefs and prescriptions about the situation. But since October 7th, and especially since the Israeli incursion into Gaza, I’ve realized that it’s an unavoidable topic. It’s now polarizing people here and I’m willing to wade in, but with the proviso that I don’t weigh in from a stance of expertise. I’m learning as everybody else is, I suppose.
Matt Taibbi: Well, yes and no, because maybe we don’t have expertise about Israel and Palestine, but when we start moving into speech in America and what is and isn’t part of our tradition, what is and isn’t acceptable, what’s good and what’s bad, that’s an area where I feel much more comfortable talking about. I understand the laws, I understand the history.
Walter Kirn: Sure. me-
Matt Taibbi: I’d probably come at this.
Walter Kirn: Yeah, me too. And that’s one of the reasons that I think we agreed to do this, because it’s starting to impinge on freedoms and rights in America in a way that I think is not just worthy of comment, but obliges us to comment if we’re to be consistent with past conversations and positions we’ve taken.
Matt Taibbi: Right. And to speak to something in the same way that you did, I probably came at this from a slightly different direction than you did. I’m a little bit younger and I was probably much more leaning in the direction of sympathizing with Palestine. I had Palestinian friends when I studied overseas in St. Petersburg as a young person. So, I heard a lot of stories back then. And my general inclination about this issue has always been toward condemning the blockade.
Also, Israel has really been a pioneer in the development of the model of modern digital censorship. Glenn Greenwald did one of the earliest stories about this in 2015 where he talked about Facebook making a deal with the Israeli Government and the Mossad, where basically 95% of the requests that the Mossad made to Facebook for moderation were honored. And from what I understand, Facebook was really one of the only ways that people can communicate in Gaza. They don’t have very many press organs that really work. There’s significant digital censorship of outlets, like The Electronic Intifada. And so this was a big deal and that basic arrangement that they had, which was, “If you want to make money having Facebook in Israel, this is the price that you’re going to pay. You’re going to allow us to control content that means a lot to us.” And I think since then, you’ve seen that model replicated to various degrees in other countries and it’s starting to come a little bit to the United States.
This "Oh it's so complicated, I can't really get a grip on the history and I can't be confident in what I say on the subject" smacks of disingenuous bullshit. A famously forensic investigative journalist can't read a few books? Bollocks.
Their pivot to the impact on "American freedom" and freedom of speech is on brand for them but also massively disingeuous as they don't mention the role of the apartheid state's lobby and how almost all of the repression of speech is on people criticising it. They wave a vague hand at it with the mention of EI and Facebook but that's it.
I was a pretty big Taibbi fanboy and his books still stand up as classic real journalism but it's hard to deny in any way that that Matt Taibbi is long, long gone.
Good work again. Thanks.The corporate media are complicit in the Gaza genocide. Never forget what they did. Never forgive them for it.
Re: That's excellent digging. I'm not buying Taibbi's position at all though
Yeah, it doesn't take all that much energy to look into it and get the broad outline. As one of the nitter commenters pointed out, why not ask Katie Halper or Aaron Mate for an explanation and/or book recommendations? I think he used to co-host Useful Idiots so presumably he's friends with them, or at least on speaking terms. I get that he'd want to research it himself and not rely on somebody else's say so, but he's got to have basic respect for them and accept that they know the subject.
Up to a point I can accept the decision to not cover a certain topic and focus on what you're best at, but if you're billing yourself as a commentator on a wide range of issues (I don't think Taibbi just focuses on free speech stuff, does he?) it's suspicious, or at least a dereliction of duty when you fail to comment on such a massive story. It reminds me of Caitlin Johnstone being too put off by shouty online debates to write about covid, which she initially found 'irrelevant and boring' - https://nitter.poast.org/caitoz/status/1283547746411003904#m Well, sure, if you're an average punter you can maybe give it a miss (I mostly did to begin with, too), but someone who has a well thought-out opinion on nearly every major political subject of the day chooses to duck out of a huge story like that? Something else is going on.
Anyway, I'm not ready to write Taibbi off completely on the principle that people are capable of doing good things even if they're complete bastards in other ways, but for me this is a pretty big black mark on his character, as with all the other 'progressive except for palestine' crowd who have said nothing about this genocide.
on March 15, 2025, 11:02 am