Earlier than Matt Taibbi was sparring with Democratic members of Congress on Capitol Hill earlier this 12 months over the Twitter information, he was a darling of the progressive left, showing recurrently on reveals like Democracy Now! and others hosted by Invoice Moyers and Rachel Maddow.
Although he was at all times a fierce critic of the Democratic institution, the rise of Donald Trump all of the sudden meant that anybody nominally left of heart—together with progressive journalists like Taibbi—was anticipated to assist Hillary Clinton unconditionally. So when he attacked her as a sellout, argued that the Russiagate narrative was largely bullshit, and equated the manipulative techniques of proper and left media personalities, progressives gave him the chilly shoulder. Elected Democrats began treating him like a puppet of the precise.
In 2020, Taibbi began publishing his work on Substack and rapidly grew to become one of many platform’s hottest writers, incomes way over he ever did at Rolling Stone, the place he had been chief political reporter. He grew to become much more of a pariah by publishing exhaustive studies that documented how the federal government sought to regulate what was mentioned on Twitter about COVID-19 and efforts by Russia to affect U.S. elections. Congressional Democrats unconvincingly pilloried him as a pretend journalist, an apologist for Vladimir Putin, and a stooge for Elon Musk.
I caught up with Taibbi at FreedomFest, an annual gathering held this 12 months in Memphis, to speak concerning the new challenges to free speech, why legacy media is dying, and the way identification politics are poisoning political discourse.
