Matt Taibbi’s Willful Credulousness

When cynicism morphs into gullibility

There’s a certain kind of formerly dissident writer who pretends to believe that in the last few months nothing has fundamentally changed. Trump may have won, but the rest of the status order in America is basically the same. The same people and the same institutions hold the same power over the public discourse that they did before. The same media outlets and the same class of Americans wield the same influence they always have and deserve the same mockery and ridicule. The elites of last year are the elites of this one. There’s no reason to change the cast. The soundtrack is the same.

With all due respect to Matt Taibbi — and I know him, like him, have collaborated with him and do indeed have a good deal of respect for him — he is one of those writers. Though he is not the only one.

Matt has earned a reputation for being a free speech warrior. He spent the last four years exhaustively reporting on Biden’s online censorship regime. More than once, he testified before Congress about it. He was not only right to do so, but perhaps even brave, given the potential and actual backlash from his left-leaning fans, a creepy visit from the IRS, and a member of Congress threatening to imprison him. He also benefited from it, of course, building for himself a massive new audience of conservative readers and a lot of powerful allies in the Republican caucus. Those benefits were well-deserved — good, principled journalism should be rewarded with new readers and maybe even with new champions in Congress. But they appear to come with strings attached.

In contrast to his First Amendment advocacy under the Biden administration, Matt has spent the last few months saying almost nothing critical about Trump’s blitzkrieg on free speech, and writing quite a bit on why it’s either justified or no-big-deal-when-you-think-about-it. He shrugs off the Trump administration’s campaign to strong-arm colleges and universities into adopting anti-woke speech codes — it’s nothing new, just the shoe on the other foot. He thinks Harvard should have its non-profit status rescinded for the sake of its comeuppance; never mind that the threat is being wielded to suppress student protests and stifle academic dissent from those whose viewpoints the administration wants silenced. He defends Trump’s defunding of public media as long overdue, since NPR and PBS have long been cringey libtard state media.

You can consider these arguments on their own merits and find each of them defensible. But the overall pattern is a willful refusal to see the forest for the trees. What’s happening under Trump is not subtle or complicated. The administration itself is barely pretending not to be suppressing constitutionally-protected speech. It has demanded that disfavored departments at Columbia be forced into academic receivership. It has insisted on audits of departments at Harvard that “fuel antisemitic harassment or reflect ideological capture.” It has accused Harvard of teaching its students contempt for the free market system and used that charge to help justify cutting federal funds. Along with its blackmailing of law firms and its detention and deportation of international students who criticize Israel, it could hardly be more obvious that Trump’s goal is to make it unsafe to express political dissent in America. That isn’t hyperbole or some kind of ominous warning, it’s what’s plainly happening before our eyes. Matt was exquisitely attuned to the insidious erosion of free speech under the Biden administration’s secretive program of surveilling and flagging social media posts, but can barely acknowledge Trump ramrodding the First Amendment with all the artfulness of the Kool-Aid Man punching through a brick wall.

Matt is accustomed to criticisms like this from people like me. He has long been the black sheep of liberal journalists. His unpopularity with them began with Russiagate, when he took a fact-based and principled stand against the conspiracy theories that had infected the brains of half of Congress and nearly all of the establishment media. Left-leaning readers badgered him endlessly to balance his criticisms of Democrats and the press with the occasional tirade against Trump. Matt’s consistent response was that journalism is not activism, and that almost every national reporter in America was doing nothing but inveighing against Trump — what was the value of piling on other than to enforce groupthink?

Matt was right. But that was then, and this is now. Things have changed quite a bit over the last few months, but Matt seems loath to admit it. Doing so would surely alienate a significant portion of his new readers and allies. His reluctance to cross that line has led him to continue portraying his habitual handwaving away of Trump’s authoritarianism as a reflection of his adherence to journalistic principle rather than a surrender to audience capture, no matter how obvious it is to everyone else.

The other day, he wrote this on Notes:

The criticism “You don’t criticize Trump enough” is maddening because you learn it has to be constant to be accepted, and there’s seldom any effort to acknowledge opposing factors . . .

The Öztürk story for instance really would be an ominous development if it were for sure true that she was detained for writing one op-ed, which is the contention of her attorneys. But Marco Rubio has specifically denied this, saying there’s more to the story, and though he easily may not be telling the truth, it’s infuriating to see that key detail ignored in coverage of the top papers.

He’s referring here to Rumeysa Ozturk, the Tufts graduate student who was arrested and imprisoned by ICE for co-writing a year-old op-ed that criticized her university for refusing to endorse a boycott of Israel. When I asked Matt a few days ago when exactly Marco Rubio “specifically denied” that Ozturk did no more than co-write an op-ed, he pointed me to a press conference on March 27 in which this exchange occurred:

QUESTION: Hello, Mr. President. Thank you for taking questions from us. We appreciate it. Humeyra Pamuk from Reuters. Mr. Secretary, a Turkish student in Boston was detained and handcuffed on the street by plainclothes agents. A year ago she wrote an opinion piece about the Gaza war. Could you help us understand what the specific action she took led to her visa being revoked? And what was your State Department’s role in that process?

SECRETARY RUBIO: We revoked her visa. It’s an F1 visa, I believe. We revoked it, and here’s why – and I’ll say it again; I’ve said it everywhere. Let me be abundantly clear, okay. If you go apply for a visa right now anywhere in the world – let me just send this message out – if you apply for a visa to enter the United States and be a student and you tell us that the reason why you’re coming to the United States is not just because you want to write op-eds, but because you want to participate in movements that are involved in doing things like vandalizing universities, harassing students, taking over buildings, creating a ruckus, we’re not going to give you a visa. If you lie to us and get a visa and then enter the United States and with that visa participate in that sort of activity, we’re going to take away your visa.

If you read his comments carefully, or even not that carefully, you’ll find that Rubio in fact “specifically denied” nothing about Ozturk. He pivoted from a question about her case in particular to a hypothetical example, which afforded him the freedom to suggest that she had done things that she had not, such as “vandalizing buildings,” without actually saying she did those things. It was a deft exercise in smearing someone while retaining plausible deniability. And Matt, usually such a cautious and skeptical reader of just such government double-speak, ate it up.

The next day, Rubio had another press conference in which he came closer to claiming what Matt suggests he claimed. In response to a question about Ozturk, he said this:

But I would add to this that I would caution you against solely going off of what the media has been able to identify, and those presentations, if necessary, will be made in court.

The insinuation in that case was pretty flagrant, but even this statement fell short of any specific claim about the evidence against Ozturk. (I’m going to lengths here to steelman Matt’s argument, since he never actually referenced this remark at all.)

Matt’s frustration with the “top papers,” then, is that they failed to attribute to Rubio, in some kind of warped quest for balance, a claim he did not make. Matt has criticized NPR for acting like state media, but here he’s demanding that reporters literally invent propaganda on behalf of the Trump administration.

It’s a good thing for mainstream reporters that they didn’t listen to him, because it is now, in Matt’s words, “for sure true that she was detained for writing one op-ed.” Matt himself has finally (sort of) acknowledged it. After spending six miserable weeks in ICE detention, where she was deprived of access to treatment for her asthma, Ozturk had her bail hearing on Friday, and the court released her. “There has been no evidence that has been introduced by the government other than the Op-Ed,” the judge stated.

Matt once wrote a very good book about the demise of the modern media. In it, he cautioned readers against falling for government propaganda slipped into news reports by agencies “salting audiences with scary warnings, so later action looks more proportionate.” But in this case he not only fell into that trap himself; he helped construct it, by salting his audience with scary warnings that even Rubio himself stopped short of issuing.

This is just one case, and anyone is entitled to make a bad call from time to time. But for Matt, it’s a mistake that fits into a recent pattern. To him, almost nothing is an actual, bona fide abuse of power by the White House. With the occasional caveat, everything is Democrats or the media lying or exaggerating on behalf of the elites. The media, to be sure, has earned his contempt in countless ways, but if you keep using the same line for long enough, eventually it becomes a bit. That’s what it is now for Matt.

In the last few months, instead of reporting on the Trump administration’s full frontal assault on free speech, Matt’s publication, Racket, has picked on all the usual suspects: Harvard, The New York Times, David Brooks, Antifa. They’re deserving targets; I’ve picked on many of them myself. But the reason such attacks felt so satisfying a year ago is that back then they were all part of the same suffocating, hegemonic political monoculture that pervaded every elite cultural institution in the country. That was true even when Trump was president the first time around.

But it isn’t true anymore. If there’s a suffocating, hegemonic political monoculture today, it’s MAGA. But rarely do you hear Matt’s trademark caustic sarcasm pointed in that direction. Matt isn’t punching up anymore. His flogging of all these dead liberal horses, alongside his tip-toeing around the most egregious attacks on free speech in the better part of the last century, now amounts to caping for the truly powerful.

Matt is hardly the only one. My own former publication, Public, runs attack after attack on Democrats, European elites, and even the Obama administration, as if any of these parties are still determining the present course of world events. On the day that Ozturk was released from custody and the judge in the case expressed concern that noncitizens “may now avoid exercising their First Amendment rights for fear of being whisked away to a detention center from their home,” Public ran a piece praising Trump for his free speech advocacy.

But Matt is a guy who should know better. His dissent on Russiagate demonstrated his journalistic integrity at a time when it really mattered. He’s shown little of that quality lately.