The Leopards Are At It Again

Who Killed Matt Taibbi?

I like Matt Taibbi. I don’t like everything he’s done, I definitely do not like what he’s become, but I respect him. I hate to use the g-word—it’s gauche and pretentious and there can really only be one—but the fact remains: there just aren’t many of us left. Football season is over. Gonzo—more like gone-zo, am I right?

Taibbi had that thing, he had that voice, he was iconoclastic and delightful to read. It’s comparatively easy to write an article about a Republican national convention or right-wing musical theater that reads like a 1AM bar conversation with a wasted and insane stranger, but Taibbi did it with the finance beat. You cannot talk me out of my fandom.

I’m not here to shit on my heroes but I’m definitely here to hold them to account. Taibbi just published an article on substack, which is free to read, about everything that led up to his explosive departure from Twitter a few days ago, and it’s incredibly instructive. We can learn from his mistakes.

(for those of you who don’t know the Taibbi arc, congratulations and also here’s a summary of both the Twitter Files and the eventual falling out)

Taibbi starts out with an analysis of Musk’s Twitter takeover that contains two of them:

…From the Washington Post: “Musk’s ‘free speech’ agenda dismantles safety work at Twitter, insiders say.” The Post story was about the “troubling” decision to re-instate the Babylon Bee, and numerous stories like it implied the world would end if this “‘free speech’ agenda” was imposed.

I didn’t have to know any of the particulars of the intramural Twitter dispute to think anyone who wanted to censor the Babylon Bee was crazy. To paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut, going to war against a satire site was like dressing up in a suit of armor to attack a hot fudge sundae.

Your first mistake—and it’s one you make throughout this article—is letting people you don’t like determine which side you’re on—in this case, apparently, the first four paragraphs of a very long and nuanced article. Never occurred to you that maybe there are accounts worse than the Bee who no longer had a platform on Twitter Dot Com? Never occurred to you that some of them might be peddling ideas that are worth suiting up to oppose? Holocaust denial, white supremacy, endorsement of sexual assault, endorsement of physical violence against trans people?

I don’t know for sure how you’d respond to this, of course, but your recent work suggests something like: “I don’t believe in censorship, I believe everyone should have access to a microphone.” and if so, that would be your second mistake.

I would once again like to propose the potluck theory of appropriate discourse: if we are both at a potluck and I show up with a giant tray of olives and you hate olives, are allergic to olives, or had a traumatic experience with olives as a child, I still get to put my olives on the table. You don’t have to eat the olives but lots of people enjoy them and they’re good, wholesome food.

If, however, I show up to your potluck with a giant tray of feces, you should not let me put that on the table. The problem with serving poop at a potluck isn’t that you don’t personally care for it; it is that eating poop is very dangerous, completely disgusting, and just having it on the table is going to ruin the meal for everyone.

Put another way:

You go on to make a third mistake, which doesn’t seem as morally fraught as the other two but might be the most dangerous misconception yet, in a roundabout way:

This was an obvious moral panic and the very real consternation at papers like the Washington Post and sites like Slate over these issues seemed to offer the new owners of Twitter a huge opening. With critics this obnoxious, even a step in the direction of free speech values would likely win back audiences that saw the platform as a humorless garrison of authoritarian attitudes

What year do you think this is, Matt? Do you think there’s a huge contingent of people in this country who actually value free speech? Forget about the shit platter: the 2023 Internet is a place where people spend all day, every day, screaming about olives. Maybe the olives have Dylan Mulvaney’s face on them and maybe the olives are people who used an ableist slur back in 2010, but everyone seems to agree that the olives have to go.

Did it ever occur to you to ask whether Elon Musk also had a penchant for banning olives from the table? Whether maybe, like so many other people, his “free speech absolutist” position was a euphamism for “free speech absolutist when it comes to speech I like”?

Of course not.

This was the context under which I met Musk and the circle of adjutants who would become the go-betweens delivering the material that came to be known as the Twitter Files. I would have accepted such an invitation from Hannibal Lecter, but I actually liked Musk. His distaste for the blue-check thought police who’d spent more than a half-year working themselves into hysterics at the thought of him buying Twitter — which had become the private playground of entitled mainstream journalists — appeared rooted in more than just personal animus.

Once again, you are allowing your enemies to define your position. “I don’t like hysterical crying libs so anyone who also doesn’t like them must be friendly.” Incorrect! Patently untrue! I am infamously at war with mice right now, and leopards eat mice, but I am not going to invite a leopard into my apartment to take care of the mouse problem. Because then I’d have a leopard problem.

I would have accepted such an invitation from Hannibal Lecter

Well, there’s the trouble.

Moreover the decision to release the company’s dirty laundry for the world to see was a potentially historic act. To this day I think [Musk] did something incredibly important by opening up these communications for the public.

I haven’t written about the Twitter files because I haven’t carved out time to pour over them in earnest. They are interminable and difficult to parse in their current format, the story is really complicated, and you’ve also been sloppy.

But you’re not wrong about the importance of the documents.

I’m not like you, Matt. I don’t let my enemies determine my positions. I don’t forget the FBI is dangerous just because Hannibal Lecter is the one telling me so. It matters, a lot, that the FBI had intense pull over Twitter moderation. It matters a lot that tiny accounts got shut down over making dumb jokes about when election day was, and that the Hunter Biden laptop story was suppressed; the laptop is a nothing story but coordinated government suppression of an inconvenient headline scares the shit out of me.

Hannibal helps Clarice. She accepts that help. At some points she even likes him. But she never fully forgets that he’s a killer, a psychopath, a monster with an agenda of his own.

Not you, though:

Normally when someone comes to you with a story you ask what it is they want or expect out of press coverage, both so you can understand their motives and to avoid misunderstandings later on. I asked the question, but I can’t say I ever fully understood the answer. It didn’t matter.

IT MATTERED QUITE A LOT ACTUALLY

When we got into the Files, we were caught off guard. The content-policing system was more elaborate and organized than any of us imagined. A communications highway had been built linking the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence with Twitter, Facebook, Google, and a slew of other platforms. Among other things this looked more like a cartel than a competitive media landscape, and I had an uneasy feeling early on that publicizing this arrangement might create a host of unanticipated problems for everyone involved. Still, there was no question this was in the public interest. So we kept going.

This one I actually get. You didn’t think it was going to be a big story and then it was a big story and by then it was too late, you’d felt that thing, that almost-painful heartbeat click when the story reveals itself to you. You would sacrifice anything to write it—your blood as ink and your bones for a fountain pen. Your heart ripped out atop an Aztec pyramid. Whatever it takes.

I get it.

But if you felt that way, why not tell the whole story? Why not take the time to fact-check, why not turn that gaze around on Musk? Why not tell it right?

About two weeks into the #TwitterFiles project, [Twitter] suspended the accounts of CNN’s Donnie O’Sullivan, Ryan Mac of the New York Times, VOA’s Steve Herman, and a few other social media personalities like Aaron Rupar, reportedly for sharing information about the movement of Elon Musk’s private jet.

My phone instantly blew up with wisecracks. “I must have missed John Stuart Mill’s ‘private jet exception’ passage in On Liberty,” texted one ball-busting friend. After about six ringtones I rolled my eyes, popped an Advil, and turned my phone off, knowing what was coming. The suspensions, even if quickly reversed, were sure to ignite nuclear levels of pearl-clutching and self-pity among the same censorious power-worshipping media jerks who a few months before were howling about Musk because they thought he was for free speech.

A couple things:

1. “Advil” is not the word I would structurally expect in that sentence but what do I know, impressive use of an NSAID to calm your nerves I guess

2. This paragraph has more spin than a tweaker-operated Tilt-a-Whirl

Yes, Matt, Musk did suspend CNN and VOA and all those other assholes you hate, and we’ll get to that in a second, but they got suspended for retweeting a guy who got suspended, and that guy did not work for the New York Times at all. Jack Sweeney was a guy who took publicly-available information and posted it to Twitter Dot Com and Musk put on that suit of armor and threw that hot fudge sundae against the wall while he screamed and cried.

But you don’t want to talk about that. You want to talk about the people who stepped in the broken glass afterwards. The people you dislike.

“It’s the paradox of tolerance” you would perhaps retort with more than a bit of condescention. “They were intolerant and now they’re getting banned and they deserve it.” Sorry: doesn’t work here. The pearl-clutching libs didn’t get banned for advocating intolerance, they got banned for sharing completely OK posts from an account that should not have been banned.

From that moment the project was a football between two committed antagonists: a sporadically censorious CEO I didn’t really understand on one hand, and on the other, a bloc of vicious uniparty authoritarians who were committed to throttling speech as an ideological goal, whose methods and tendencies felt all too familiar. The latter group isn’t interested in engagement and prefers a strategy of obliteration.

1. This is the exact moment that you should have realized how important it was to understand the man behind your hookup and the game that he was playing

2. You seem to believe that a man with “sporadic” morals and more money than God is less dangerous than a man with morals you dislike, and buddy, I'm just not sure that’s true

(we’ll get to the uniparty authoritarians later)

We were never on the same side as Musk exactly, but there was a clear confluence of interests rooted in the fact that the same institutional villains who wanted to suppress the info in the Files also wanted to bankrupt Musk. That’s what makes the developments of the last week so disappointing.

The word you’re looking for is “inevitable.” The thing about alliances of convenience is: when they stop being convenient, they vanish.

The enemy of your enemy is not your friend. You’re 53 years old. You should know this by now.

There was a natural opening to push back on the worst [censorious] actors with significant public support if Musk could hold it together and at least look like he was delivering on the implied promise to return Twitter to its “free speech wing of the free speech party” roots.

OH SO IT’S JUST OPTICS TO YOU OK GOOD TO KNOW

The problem in 2023 isn’t that the emperor has no clothes; it’s that he only has clothes. It’s all aesthetics—of free speech, of rationality, of science—and, on the Online Left, the aesthetics of kindness and tolerance. It’s all fake. It’s all bullshit. No one cares what’s really going on. It’s steaks made out of sawdust, marked cruelty-free and grass-fed.

...the triggering incident revolved around Substack, a relatively small company that’s nonetheless one of the few oases of independent media and free speech left in America. In my wildest imagination I couldn’t have scripted these developments, especially my own very involuntary role.

That’s because you decided you didn’t need to understand, Matt. No one paying attention was the least bit surprised.

I first thought I was being pranked by news of Substack URLs being suppressed by [Musk]. “No way,” I thought, but other Substack writers insisted it was true: their articles were indeed being labeled, and likes and retweets of Substack pages were being prohibited.

As many unfortunately know now, my next move was to ask Elon what was going on…if Twitter was going to label our work unsafe and not allow us to share my articles, I couldn’t endorse all this by using the platform, and said so. This prompted a quick ping! and a furious Signal question: “So you want Substack to kill Twitter?”…

…I was still shaking my head and en route to Disneyland with my kids that night when I heard mid-flight that all of my Twitter Files threads had been disabled (all were frozen last Friday evening). Though Twitter fixed this that same night, I was next subject to what was described to me as a “blanket search ban.”

From Taibbi’s Substack

To the outside world this looked like shadowbanning to a degree that was comical even compared to the weirder edge cases we’d seen in the Twitter Files.

To be fair, the only reason it looked that way is that this is precisely what it was.

Taibbi, you should know better. You covered Goldman Sachs and the other Wall Street ghouls in the aftermath of the 2008 crash. You have traded one master for another, and it turns out they both suck.

From earlier in the article:

[Musk] talked about wanting to restore transparency, but also seemed to think his purchase was funny, which I also did (spending $44 billion with a laugh as even a partial motive was hard not to admire).

Come on, man. When Twitter was a more or less regular company—to whatever extent a Silicon Valley company can ever be regular—it could only screw up so much before it went bankrupt and stopped existing. If it truly became pearl-clutching radlib hell (and I also would hate that, there’s a reason I’m not on the Fediverse), the lack of advertising would have led the company to either go under or be sold to someone with a different vision. That very thing is happening right now. Twitter is hemmorhaging advertisers. Or—wait, how did you put it—

Vicious uniparty authoritarians…[aren’t] interested in engagement and [prefer] a strategy of obliteration. This played out in a very real way for new Twitter from the start, in the form of sweeping advertiser boycotts led by groups like David Brock-founded Media Matters, Free Press, Accountable Tech and Color of Change.

“Obliteration” is a hell of a word for not wanting to buy an ad that might appear on Daily Stormer founder Andrew Anglin’s freshly-restored Twitter account, but you’re not wrong that corporate money usually matters for the longevity of a platform. That’s a bad situation, but you know what’s worse? Only one guy’s money mattering.

Regular giant corporations just want to make money for the shareholders. And if it’s bad for their bottom line to advertise on a platform that reinstates the accounts of people who write sentences like: “Just as it is axiomatic that Jews belong in an oven, so is it that women deserve to be slapped,” they’re going to stop doing that. It’s not a great moral handbrake, but it’s something.

Elon Musk doesn’t need advertisers. Elon Musk doesn’t need anything. He can reinstate Andrew Anglin and ban Jack Sweeney and nothing about his life will change. He can rail against censorship while censoring opposition to Narendra Modi, India’s fascist leader, and no one can stop him. And that’s worse. You do get how that’s worse, right?

So no one who’s interested in continued releases of #TwitterFiles reports doubts it, I would have crawled across broken glass, eaten maggots by the bucket, anything — you can choose your own self-abasing image — to be able to keep doing Files searches.

Crawl across all the broken glass you want. Eat maggots, bleed yourself dry: I’m a writer too, I get it. That’s not your sin. Your sin is writing a one-dimensional story.

Here’s the real scoop, Taibbi, the sick sad truth: we live in a hideously curated world and the only thing up for debate is who curates it. A billionaire asshole? The FBI? Donald Trump? Censorious pseudoleftist radlibs who think every form of online disagreement comes straight from the Kremlin and/or that anyone who disagrees with them is fash?

It’s all bullshit, Matt. We’re all trapped. No one should know that better than you, right now.

When the Twitter Files broke, I sat down to write a quick article entitled “Who Killed Matt Taibbi?” In the course of doing research for it, though, it became clear that this could not be a quick article, because:

1. The twitter files had merit, but it was going to take time to figure out how much and in what way

2. I figured out who killed you

In 2017, Taibbi published I Can’t Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street about Eric Garner’s murder at the hands of police. This is a vitally important story exhaustively researched for many months and published three years before the world caught up and started to light police precincts on fire. It’s the kind of story worth sacrificing everything to tell right.

It should have been a triumph. A magnum opus. But that’s not how things shook out. Instead, articles started popping up about Taibbi’s time at The eXile, which he ran with Mark Ames in Russia back in the 90s and 2000s.

Vanity Fair has an absolutely incredible article on the eXile: a completely unhinged publication that mixed smut, violence, satire (this part is important), and hard-hitting reporting that made an actual difference. A drug-fueled testosterone-poisoned lecherous hellhole whirlwind sex drugs rock’n’roll gonzo nightmare of a publication that fills me with desperate and eternal longing.

Lord knows I’ve wanted a lot of things that are Bad, things that have endangered and wrecked my life: in no way is my broken brain any kind of defense of whatever the hell went on over there. Someday I’ll do enough research to have a firm opinion, but I haven’t yet, and anyway, this isn’t really about what’s true. This is about Matt Taibbi’s murder, and in order to understand what killed him I’m going to need you to take a second to see what happened next through his eyes.

Here’s what Taibbi had to say about the incident on Facebook:

In a chapter written by my former co-editor Mark Ames…he brags about harassing women in the newspaper office. The behavior he describes is reprehensible. It is also, like a lot of things in the eXile, fictional and not true--I have never made advances or sexually suggestive comments to any co-worker in any office, here or in Russia.

The dozens of thinkpieces that came out around this time quote Taibbi saying some very gross stuff, but the truly grotesque and awful shit—sex with underage girls, violence and coersion towards women—is entirely attributed to Aimes, at least as far as I can tell.

Does Taibbi still bear unforgivable responsibility as a bystander? How do you separate satire from fact here, persona from the author? Does it matter? Are fantasies about violent misogyny bad whether true or false?

I’ll leave that debate to the comments section. What’s important for this autopsy is that Taibbi spent years of his life writing a very important book about a man who was murdered by police—a towering work of social justice—and just at the moment when that work should have paid off and made a difference and provided him a platform for even greater things in the future, he was pilloried as a violent misogynist and cast out of polite society. His book sold well, but not as well as it should have. Reviews were very positive, but they made sure to specify that Taibbi himself was a creep and beyond the pale.

As a writer, this is the most shredding thing I can imagine. I really think it might kill me.

Taibbi’s career has never been the same, and neither has Taibbi. How could he be? How could he ever forgive the people who casually threw his most virtuous work away because of what, to him, feels like poor judgment and bad taste in his 20s?

And now he’s here. So poisoned by hate that he’s willing to ally with the very forces of capital he pilloried in 2010 just to get back at the censorious bastards. The people who destroyed him and neutered his career.

I want to say that I don’t get it. But I get it. I get it completely.

The left-of-centers hate him. The Musk fanboys hate him. Taibbi says he’ll repost the Twitter Files to Truth Social but that place is a fanclub, not a platform; he will find no succor there. There has been much talk of leopards and faces of late but if anyone is a leopard in this story it is Taibbi: cruel, perhaps, but beautiful. Endangered, debased, captured; pacing in a cage that grows smaller every second while the people on the outside stare.