Here's Why Musk Chose Matt Taibbi to Destroy the FBI
Taibbi's politics stop at the scandal's edge
My friend Joe Hoft is curious as to why Elon Musk would grant Matt Taibbi the privilege of exposing Twitter’s dysfunction under Jack Dorsey whilst destroying the FBI. He wrote about Taibbi’s past on The Gateway Pundit recently.
Joe points out that Matt Taibbi is a liberal and always has been. He never hid his liberalism, and he has not reformed his political views. Taibbi was also attacked a few years ago for misogynistic writings from turn of the century.
Joe’s concerns are legitimate, but they miss something important: Matt Taibbi might be the best investigative reporter going because he doesn’t let his politics interfere with his mission of outing bad guys.
My Inspiration for the 2009 Independence Day Tea Party
My introduction to Matt Taibbi came with a July issue of Rolling Stone magazine and Matt’s article, “The Great American Bubble Machine” which exposed Goldman Sachs as both the primary cause and primary beneficiary of the 2008 financial collapse.
I chose Matt’s article as the core of my remarks for two reasons:
Goldman Sachs’ above-the-law treatment by government exmplified the vast American corruption that inspired the Tea Party movement in the first place.
Matt Taibbi’s liberalism increased the credibility of the Tea Party’s arguments. Liberals who rejected anything I said out of hand could not easily reject the same arguments propounded by one of their own in one of their own favorite magazines.
A third reason for building on Taibbi’s narrative was my desire that the Tea Party look for common ground with liberals. Taibbi’s Rolling Stone article was the perfect gem: everything that was wrong with America in one 2,000-word piece.
At the time, Taibbi was warning America that global warming would be the next big scam perpetrated by Goldman using government as its muscle.
And instead of credit derivatives or oil futures or mortgage-backed CDOs, the new game in town, the next bubble, is in carbon credits — a booming trillion dollar market that barely even exists yet, but will if the Democratic Party that it gave $4,452,585 to in the last election manages to push into existence a groundbreaking new commodities bubble, disguised as an “environmental plan,” called cap-and-trade.
Just that sentence hit all the key points:
Repeated bubbles that transfer wealth from the people to Wall Street elites.
The revolving door between Washington DC and Wall Street.
The way corporations bribe politicians and bureaucrats to get around the law.
The next scam to be perpetrated by Washington on behalf of a corporate interests.
The beauty of this 2009 article is that liberals read it. The messenger was one of their own. Rush Limbaugh or Victor Davis Hansen might have said the same thing, but only the right would have heard them. Taibbi was calling out his own party and the heroes of the left. Priceless.
Taibbi vs. Fauci
The five people who did the most damage to the pharmaceutical scam known as Covid 19 were Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Glenn Greenwald, Alex Berenson, Naomi Wolf, and, of course, Matt Taibbi. All four are certified liberals who bucked the party line to yell the truth at those who would listen.
Once again, when serious matters were at stake, Taibbi subordinated party to truth. Taibbi lost the left by insisting on writing the truth regardless of which party or candidate the truth favored. He would not kowtow to Pfizer or Fauci or the CDC. He pointed out the revolving door between Pfizer and the FDA which allows for dangerous and often useless drugs to receive the FDA’s imprimatur without any serious testing.
Again, the value of Taibbi’s voice is that the left cannot write him off as a right-wing ideologue.
Taibbi and Free Speech
Most of all, Taibbi was the right messenger for Musk’s #TwitterFiles dump because Matt has been a champion of free speech his entire career. His June 6 Substack announced the end of the ACLU’s guardianship over civil liberties:
The summary of that article:
The expansion of the Foundation of Individual Rights in Education marks the end of an era, when free speech issues were the sole province of American liberalism
Again, Matt Taibbi is a liberal, and liberalism once embraced free speech, skepticism, anti-corporatism, and civil liberties. When the left and the Democrat Party abandoned those principles, serious liberals like Taibbi, Kennedy Jr., Berenson, Greenwald, and Wolf refused to follow the herd. They stuck with their principles.
Has Taibbi abandoned his liberalism? No! And I don’t expect he will. To Taibbi, free speech and suspicion of powerful people are the hallmarks of liberalism. Bear in mind, when Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence, every word of the document was the bleeding edge of liberal thinking. G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis considered themselves, and were considered by their peers, liberals. Liberalism is not the opposite of conservative but the opposite of oppression. Liberalism simply believes man should be free from the arbitrary rule of other men.
Though today’s principled liberals might not like it, liberalism is founded on the belief that no man, no government, should come between man and God, that man should be free to do whatever is pleasing to God. Classical liberalism preached that we are called to care for our fellow humans because God told us to.
Taibbi has also taken to Substack recently to denounce the FBI as the new American Gestapo.
Once again, the summary:
A Florida FBI agent blows the whistle on a Bureau that's stopped worrying about making cases, shifting resources to a vast new mission: domestic spying without predicate
The article is sympathetic to those tortured by the FBI following January 6. For example:
One example involved a British doctor who’d been at J6. The suspect was not exactly Pablo Escobar. He did enter the Capitol, but surveillance showed he meekly stayed behind velvet ropes once inside, and under questioning was practically shaking with guilt over having taken a free Capitol tourist brochure as a souvenir. Though he seemed unlikely to be charged, he was booted from his medical practice after being interviewed, and Friend wondered if this even indirectly had been the point.
Anyone who recognizes and denounces the fetid excrement that is the FBI I will gladly take as an ally.
I don’t blame Joe Hoft for questioning Musk’s decision to choose Taibbi as his messenge, but I counter that Taibbi’s history of putting classical liberal principles before party and ideology made Matt the perfect scribe for this mission. The monsters in the world today are far too big for one side to fight alone. As I’ve been saying since 2013, this is not a fight between left and right, liberal and conservative, or Democrat and Republican, but a fight between the plebes and the elites.
Matt Taibbi has always been an enemy of the elite, and we should welcome him to the Tea Party's noble cause.