F**king Mondays: The Sad Matt Taibbi, Grift Walks With RFK Jr., And Dangerous False Equivalencies
It's that time of the week again!
Welcome to another edition of our most popular column,“F**king Mondays!” In the round up today:
Matt Taibbi now just making shit up
Taibbi was once considered the heir to Hunter S. Thompson and one of America’s great journalists. Now he spends his days making shit up on his enormously lucrative newsletter:
This was in response to the Ukraine/Israel aid bill and the extension of a FISA law that passed in Congress over the weekend. Unfortunately, none of it was true.
Regardless of what you might think about the bills, polling data shows the majority of Americans support aid to Ukraine, support aid to Israel, and support the renewing of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Contrary to Taibbi’s claims, the voters then, are the real boss given the passage of bills reflects their will. But who needs facts when you have an ideology to promote?
This is my major issue with journalists like Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald. While I find their contrarianism irritating, it is their shocking disregard for the basics of journalism I can’t stomach. Taibbi has been repeatedly pulled up for his failure to report honestly on his pet topics, but he continues to repeat the same mistakes over and over again. Taibbi isn’t stupid, so he clearly knows better.
It is one thing to be opposed to assisting Ukraine/Israel and supporting controversial FISA bills, but Taibbi has a duty to his readers to at least report the facts. If he can’t — or won’t — then you really have to question his motives.
Grift walks with RFK Jr.
I found this image on RFK Jr.’s Twitter feed to be extraordinarily depressing:
Apparently I missed this, but Uygur announced earlier this month that he was considering voting for RFK Jr. because, wait for it, President Biden is “funding genocide” in Gaza and has been “corrupt his whole life.” Biden apparently also “loves to rig elections,” and the Democrats are worse than Republicans because they working to censor free speech on social media. Forget the fact that RFK Jr. has staked out an even more pro-Israel stance than Biden has, and that Biden has a long track record of being one of the least corrupt politicians in modern times. Because what do facts matter when your business model is based on opposing “the establishment”?
If Uygur and The Young Turks turn their already cynical audience of alt contrarians into JFK Jr. voters, this could spell danger for Joe Biden. To his credit, Uygur voted for Biden in 2020, but it seems the alt movement has gained so much steam since he can’t resist the pull. If you aren’t opposing The Deep State in 2024, then what street cred do you have with the kids?
RFK Jr. might be nuts, but his media strategy is very, very clever. He is courting Cenk because smells a fellow grifter. Both are more interested in influence and eyeballs than democracy, so my guess is they’ll forge some sort of alliance in the coming months. Not good.
Anti-Israel, anti-Iran too?
One of the reasons why I am increasingly at odds with the identity politics left is their stunning hypocrisy over Israel. It is fine to be critical of Israel, its occupation of Palestinian territory, its far right government, and the way it is conducting warfare in Gaza, etc. It is not fine however to pretend that the Iranian government, the Houthis, and Hamas and so on are brave resistance fighters battling US/Israeli imperialism/settler colonialism/white supremacy.
The result of this delusion leads, as it often does, to good old fashioned Jew hating.
This might be qualitatively different from traditional antisemitism, but the basics aren’t too dissimilar: Jews/Israelis are all powerful and their enemies are noble oppressed victims. Jews by definition, can never be victims, even when they are subjected to appalling acts of violence. As British Iranian activist Elica Le Bon writes:
People are okay with Iranians showing solidarity towards: - Palestinians - Yemenis - Syrians - Lebanese - Afghans Etc. But draw the line when showing solidarity towards: - Israelis Why? What happened to all humans are humans? Why can’t it be and/both? From the beginning, I made best efforts to stand inclusively in solidarity with all and to caution against making this a zero sum game, but just the mention of any support for Israelis crosses every line for those determined to disunite, disturb, and disrupt the Middle East. These are our neighbors too, why should we exclude them? We get it, you hate their government. Do you love the governments of the other countries listed? History repeats itself over and over, and in 2024 we’re still unable to learn from and contemplate the downstream effects of hating and ostracizing people based on their nationality or ethnicity.
The near total ignorance over the reality of Islamic extremism and conflating its objectives with anti-colonialism is a spectacular failure of our educational institutes. As activists like Le Bon have sought to make clear, Islamo-fascist theocracies and death cults like Hamas are the very thing left wing militants are supposed to hate.
Just as you should be able to show solidarity with Palestinians, Iranians, Yemenis, and Israelis, you should be able to criticize their respective governments without being labeled a racist/colonialist/antisemite. Being consistent really isn’t that hard.
See you next week!
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I don’t see any contradiction in disliking Hamas terrorists but having sympathy for the Palestinians and disliking the Netanyahu government and feeling sympathy for the 1200 murdered Israelis. Is there any difference in liking the Biden admin for many policies but disliking the funding for Israel’s continued bombings of civilians? I can hold multiple feelings on things . It doesn’t have to be all or nothing.
While there is certainly a cadre of young people who just discovered there is violence and injustice in the Middle East…I think Nancy Pelosi is right to think Putin’s provocateurs are at work on the Internet…when you get called ‘cool with genocide’ the same way ten times by the same kind of people, one gets suspicious.