Ode to Scum

Political homelessness isn't the worst thing

I’m having a Howard Beale moment. Mad as hell, can’t take it anymore.

The last few weeks of partisan squabbling first sent me into a depressed stupor, then I woke to a current of clarifying spleen. A voice explained: “It’s not your destiny to have friends. It’s your destiny to tell everyone, Republican and Democrat, male and female, what cunts they are.”

Cunts. Generally, taboo to say in America, but less so in England, where Tom Hardy says it once every 28.5 seconds on MobLand (co-star Paddy Considine made Dead Man’s Shoes a cult classic with one snarling use of the word). Americans call someone acting out a dick, a weak descriptor because you can fully picture it, while cunt is definitionally abstract, no one knows how deep it goes. It puts the imagination to work. No one wants to be called a cunt. But that’s what some people are.

Sorry, we were talking about politics. Recapping the last weeks:

A little over a week ago, White House advisor Stephen Miller addressed reporters, explaining that “the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in a time of invasion.” As the administration considers the recent immigration influx an “invasion or rebellion,” the option of revoking habeas to speed deportations is “an option we’re considering at this time.”

Miller’s comments came on the heels of an Appeals Court Order in the case of Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk, who was released from ICE custody after being arrested and scheduled to be deported. Secretary of State Marco Rubio responded to a query about her by saying if the “reason why you’re coming to the United States is not just because you want to write op-eds” but to participate in “movements” that vandalize, harass students, and create a “ruckus,” your visa will be revoked. But the Order, among the first documents that described the government’s case, was really weak beer, considering how high-profile a move it was to forcibly remove a visa-holding Tufts student.

Öztürk was suspected of being “involved in associations that ‘may undermine U.S foreign policy by creating a hostile environment for Jewish students and indicating support for a designated terrorist organization’ including co-authoring an op-ed that found common cause with an organization that was later temporarily banned from campus.” That last part, about her affiliation with Tufts Students for Justice in Palestine, which was suspended ahead of last year’s Oct. 7^th anniversary, complicates the picture a little, but only a little, especially when certain obvious comparisons are made that highlight the absurdity of her detention (more on that below).

It’s never good when an official describes a right as a “privilege.” Miller’s America First Legal foundation was the first to file FOIA suits against both the State Department’s Global Engagement Center and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s “Mis-, Dis-, and Malinformation” team. They filed before the Twitter Files (they were way ahead of the public) and the group’s results were a big factor in exposing a censorship bureaucracy. I remember running into a pair of their lawyers in an airport in early 2023 and being glad that someone with resources was pushing these questions, even if they seemed exclusively interested in censorship of conservatives. So what? People acting out of self-interest is generally how rights get protected, the age of Jewish liberal lawyers from the ACLU fighting tooth and nail to protect Nazi speech rights apparently being a thing of the past.

I can already hear Trump supporters explaining that suspending habeas corpus, the bar against improper detention and our oldest and most fundamental civilizational right, is necessary because we’re really in an emergency. I’m sure there are people who live in places where virtually unchecked immigration either seems like or on some level is an emergency, but after eight years of Democratic propaganda justifying the skirting of bedrock rules to drop anvils on them, conservatives should be able to smell the rancid sameness of an argument. When governments determined to take rights away explain themselves, it’s always an emergency. Covid was the classic magic bullet, sending the Bill of Rights on a three-year vacation (not just here; Human Rights Watch found at least 51 countries used it as a pretext to persecute resistance to pandemic policies). “Election claims” similarly were presented as such a boundless threat they justified sweeping suppression years after the fact. Trump supporters for eight years were blasted with facefuls of this shameless non-logic, but embraced it once the issue was deportation instead of extremism, Russia, germs or whatever.

Another trick seen repeatedly before 2025 was making a figure-with-high-negatives the face of new changes (Democrats used Alex Jones and Trump to introduce censorship), so cultural arguments become about the person, not the principle. Mahmoud Khalil was this year’s first entrant, with Öztürk close behind. The rhetorical bent of her now-famous op-ed, castigating Tufts president Sunil Kumar for seeking to un-tether the campus from official political statements, isn’t my cup of tea, but it doesn’t need to be.

How deeply in danger could America possibly be from the Öztürk subset of foreign suspect, meaning legal residents who haven’t committed crimes? How large could the population of such persons possibly be? Rubio talked about canceling 300 student visas. Is making a (failed) show of force against a handful of legal edge cases worth punting the entire civil liberties issue back to the Democratic Party? It’s the same with illegal immigration, the administration’s ostensible primary concern. Is a slow pace of deportations such an intolerable development that it’s worth musing about tearing up habeas corpus, a sound bite not even George Bush bothered to give his enemies (probably because he couldn’t pronounce it, but still)? I frequently disagree with Miller on policy, but never doubted his brains until I saw that habeas presser, where he came off like a guy who just finished blowing coke with Marc Elias.

I admit to not always understanding why people in the Trump administration do what they do, and this lack of understanding is often why I take extra time before weighing in on what they do, but to me this looks like a huge unforced error, unnecessary and dangerous.

As all this was going on, someone I know fairly well, filmmaker and podcaster Leighton Woodhouse, became roughly the 6,000th ex-sort-of friend to use me to triangulate their way to Internet higher ground. It could have been handled with a phone call, but then the world would have been deprived of “Matt Taibbi’s Willful Credulousness,” where it’s learned a “formerly dissident writer” is now a whore to MAGA and audience capture. There were many head-scratching passages, but I’ll focus on the one most representative of these pieces:

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… 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… But they appear to come with strings attached… 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…

I’ve been covering digital censorship for six years, not four, starting in 2018. Until the Twitter Files in December 2022, I barely mentioned Joe Biden or the government and focused on platforms. In an apparently futile effort to get liberal reporters to care about the issue I mainly covered episodes involving figures on the left: Chris Hedges, Jordan Chariton, Canadian Real News founder Paul Jay, Mark Crispin Miller, the Democratic Socialists of America, the World Socialist Web Site, and many others.

Then there’s that “massive new audience of conservative readers.” How does Leighton know that? Did he do a reader survey? This charge is offered constantly, never with evidence, to the point where Hachette felt confident publishing a whole book called Owned about Glenn Greenwald and me whose cover reads, HOW TECH BILLIONAIRES ON THE RIGHT BOUGHT THE LOUDEST VOICES ON THE LEFT (bold language considering I never took money from any billionaires). Also on the cover? The same “strings” Leighton references, though in this case the implied puppeteers are Elon Musk and David Sacks instead of Jim Jordan:

The absence of actual payment from “tech billionaires” Higgins dealt with by asserting Glenn and I “sold out to conservative media” by moving to the “right-wing platform” Substack (where Higgins also publishes). There, “in one high-profile moment,” I squandered “decades of credibility” to do the Twitter Files story, after which I “cashed in” when my Substack “boomed because of the reporting and [Elon Musk’s] promotion on Twitter,” leading to “exploding” revenue.

None of this is right. It’s true I saw a bump in subscribers after the first Twitter Files story, lasting almost a month. After that, for the logical and inoffensive reason that the material came out on Twitter, the site lost subscribers for all of January and February of 2023. When Democrats went bananas on me in the House that March, readers returned. Then the thing with Elon happened. It’s uncanny how people who hold me up as a mercenary and grifter look past this moment, when I made a decision to say no to a volatile billionaire, knowing it would be costly (strange behavior for someone whose MO is “caping for the truly powerful”). I think Elon saw the Twitter Files as a way to build the platform as home to a new stable of high-profile “independent” journalists, so when I declined the offer to “post your articles to Twitter and enable our subscription service,” I was showing him up in ways I didn’t even know about. Still, he was pissed and I knew there’d be consequences. I’ll admit I didn’t grasp then the unique math of “consequences” on planet Elon, but the punchline is, that moment was the end of any “booming.”

Please don’t think I’m complaining, because that story was the thrill of a lifetime to work on, worth it a thousand times over. This site is also still doing fabulously better than my family and I could ever have expected. But to be clear, Racket grew 3000% in the two years before the Twitter Files, -6% the year after. We started growing again last year, but my “massive new audience” is still a net of less than 200 subscribers since that story’s end. And I don’t know if they’re conservative!

There are obviously many Trump supporters among the site’s readers, but anecdotally, it feels like our largest demographic is comprised of independents and disappointed liberals like me. I could be wrong, and I’m proud of our readers either way, but I don’t know. I mention it only because someone who’s sort of a friend and could have called and asked, instead threw out a sweeping claim just to make it possible to publicly call me a money-grubbing coward. If not for the other sort-of friends (plural) last week who asked me to plug their books (plural) while lecturing me on my moral failings vis-à-vis Trump, it would have been the most depressing thing to hit my in-box all month.

I’m often asked “What happened to you, man?” and laugh it off, but now I’d officially be lying if I didn’t admit to maybe being affected by overexposure to a certain kind of person. There are some dubious human categories I haven’t spent time around: child traffickers, makers of computer viruses, torturers, necrophiles, zoonecrophiles, I’m sure there are others. For my money though there’s no more shocking and shamelessly repulsive animal than the Righteous Progressive, particularly ones in media.

Summer, 2014. I’ve just left Rolling Stone to edit what was supposed to be the satirical sister publication to The Intercept. One night in our cavernous joint office near the Flatiron building I stay late and notice one of our first hires, someone highly recommended as a humorist by a Famous Hollywood Person, is hanging sink-washed t-shirts and unmentionables around his desk. He’s living in the office. At the sight of me, he nods and smiles, as in ‘Sup?

I do the math. Maybe the employee is flat-out and supporting two nieces with leukemia or something. Who knows? Of course, he’s put me in a spot. If I say something, he’s fired, but if I don’t, I could be. Not the nicest thing to do to someone who just gave you a cushy full-benefits job, but what throws me is an indefinable haughtiness in his expression, like he not only knows I won’t say anything, but has it worked out the situation is my fault somehow. Soon after I’m asked by corporate if I know about anyone living in the office. I wince and say no. Months after, in an apparent office coup, he works with a female employee to file a harassment complaint that includes this evidence of discrimination: upon hearing that a woman Alex Pareene and I wanted to hire chose Fox, I laughed and said, “Well, fuck her then.” I’m cleared, but told I can only stay if I give up my title and benefits. I pass. Mr. Office Laundry is still an employee. He was recently quoted in Owned, lamenting my rightward turn.

A few years later The Guardian ran a #MeToo piece comparing me to Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby based on one fictional book passage written by Mark Ames, timing it to the release of I Can’t Breathe. A slew of liberal publications piled on, claiming for instance that I’d “boasted of molesting teenagers.” I was quickly dumped by my publisher, losing most of my income as my third child arrived. I was so brainwashed that it took over a month before I asked: If they really think I’m a serial rapist, where’s the investigation? Neither employers nor accusing media bothered to question my female co-workers. When The Guardian’s Jessa Crispin was asked why she didn’t try to contact any of the alleged victims, she said, “I have not written about these accusations as a journalist.” (In what capacity did she write? As a cabbage?) I was forced to take at least one close friend to court and though my name was quietly tidied from these “Sexual Predator” stories, I still emerged a social leper, barred from every major publisher and agency, just in time for the first Trump presidency.

In fact I was already radioactive, but this is where Leighton says my unpopularity with liberal media began, with Russiagate, when I “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.” Most of the “principle” was just caution, because stories about everything Trump-related were rushed and based on sourcing that obviously would not hold up. I was cautious in the other direction, too, not tearing into Russiagate until the Mueller report ended all suspense about Russian spying. Even after that fiasco ended, I had editors tell me Ukrainegate for sure meant “they’ve got him this time,” but I squirmed out of those assignments too because something felt off. Years later, that episode looks like it might have been more of a story in the opposite direction. Pretty much every single time, I was right to blow off those who (as Leighton put it) “badgered me endlessly to balance his criticisms of Democrats and the press with the occasional tirade against Trump.”

That was not because I liked Trump or even thought much about him, but because I didn’t see this as a normal electoral battle. Instead, I saw institutional elites unifying to rub out an irksome voter revolt. This was an extension of a disagreement I’d long had about campaign reporting. I’d covered races since 2004 and long before Trump arrived concluded the purpose of each agonizing two-year campaign of primaries, polls, debates, endorsements, Jefferson-Jackson dinners, scandals, and cable nerf-battles was to prevent establishment-unacceptable candidates (Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich, etc.) from breaking through. The ritual the Daily Show called “Clusterf**k to the White House” was a PR snow job, designed to convince liberals opposing war was impractical and that organized labor didn’t need to support labor candidates, while conservatives were propagandized to stop wondering why their own politicians kept expanding government. The campaign press was like an immune system, there to badger to death anything off-message, even a gently antiwar run by Howard Dean.

The end goal of the show was to eliminate real politics and secure matchups like Folksy v. Wonky (Bush v. Gore), Yale v. Yale (Bush v. Kerry) or the media’s favorite, Kennedyesque v. Reaganesque (Any Democrat v. Any Republican). Races rarely saw substantive choice on that year’s chief issue (the 2004 election for instance let us pick between two Iraq War supporters). The reason I have such a long history of trashing both parties (my first book here was called Spanking the Donkey) is because I never saw them as antagonists, but as factions of the same establishment whole. They differed on minor issues while pledging continuity on major ones like war, NATO, the Fed, bailouts, criminal justice disparities, etc. Trump’s conquest of the GOP in 2016 in that sense was a major, unprecedented event (unprecedented since William Jennings Bryan anyway), when sheer voter irritation allowed democracy to overwhelm the “guardrails.” I misread Trump’s 2016 nomination, thinking he’d be blown out in a result that would shut the door on revolt. “In a two-party state, when one collapses, doesn’t that mean only one is left? And isn’t that a bad thing?” I wrote, adding:

Thirteen million and three hundred thousand Republican voters had defied the will of their party and soundly rejected hundred-million-dollar insider favorites like Jeb Bush to re-seize control of their own political destiny… It was a tremendous accomplishment that real-life conservative voters did what progressives could not quite do in the Democratic primaries. Republican voters penetrated the many layers of money and political connections and corporate media policing… designed to keep the riffraff from getting their mitts on the political process.

Trump was predicted. Pre-2016, American election satires almost always involved an unlikely deus ex machina like a plane crash (Head of State) botched suicide (Bulworth) or offhand prank (Man of the Year) lifting an incautious truth-telling outsider past the usual obstacles to expose a typical poll-guided establishment-mannequin-dipshit, like Nick Searcy’s McCain stand-in Brian Lewis in Head of State, who had only two things to say: “God bless America, and no place else,” and “I’m a war hero, and Sharon Stone’s cousin.” Squared off against this idiot, Chris Rock’s accidental nominee Mays Gilliam could point out: “You show me a grown man that’s never said shit and I’ll show you somebody that’s full of shit!” When Gilliam rose in the polls saying, “If America was a woman, she would be a big-tittied woman. Everybody loves a big-tittied woman!” the system fought back the only way it knows how: by cheating. MAYS GILLIAM, HE’S FOR CANCER was the campaign:

This plot came true with Trump, and establishment figures gave up any pretense of opposition and joined hands, We Are the World style, to sell a new matchup: All Decent People v. Hitler. That Hitler won was an epic burn, in hindsight one of the funniest things of all time. It was certainly a bigger laugh than those movies. As antagonists like Bill Kristol and Hillary Clinton or David Frum and David Corn or George Bush and Ellen DeGeneres came out as pals and backed epic cheating campaigns to excise Trump from public life, it became impossible not to sympathize with this target of lawfare, spying, and lying. HE’S FOR CANCER had nothing on the real-world ads about Trump:

I never saw Trump as a politician. He was a screeching shit-monster catapulted from hell at America’s Deserving Class. When he won last Election Night it was like watching Godzilla march through an Americanized Tokyo, squashing subway cars full of screaming MSNBC producers, stepping on the lawyers in smart glasses and Tumi bags running in terror from White & Case or Covington & Burling offices, then rearing back to send a fat blue streak of irradiated death through crowds of fleece-wearing male “allies,” Jen Psaki, and a vanishing, Japanesed Adam Schiff. Apparently now Trumpzilla’s off stomping on other things, from Harvard to Oprah to bar codes. I can absolutely think this is funny, and that most deserve this, without endorsing it.

Opponents and pundits endlessly compared Trump to Hitler but the real historical analog has always been Napoleon. Through insults to Popes and Kings he united every aristocratic faction in Europe to the point where after Waterloo, he was removed to an island in the middle of the ocean so he could no longer “disturb the peace of the world.” That was the world goal for Trump, whose similar crime was called “undermining the rules-based international order.” It’s mind-boggling how quickly “heterodox” thinkers have forgotten how ruthless, far-reaching, and authoritarian this campaign to remove the Trumpian tumor was and is. The clear endgame of speech-control laws in Europe and the aggressive moves to disqualify candidates in places like Romania and even France was to put a digital lid on nationalism and populism, and confine them to a cyber version of Napoleon’s last home on St. Helena.

I’m absolutely against throwing Öztürk in ICE detention over an op-ed, but similarly against using contempt of Congress to throw Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon in jail, a bullying tactic not used since McCarthy. I was against incarcerating hundreds of J6 protesters based on the same concept now offered by Rubio against visa-holders alleged to be harboring terroristic ideas, intent on a “ruckus.” The Bannon episode was upsetting because it was so clearly about shutting down a media voice for what Lincoln Project jackass Rick Wilson called “four vital months.” That was in addition to the five million indictments prosecutors dropped on Trump (after raiding his attorney’s office in a nod to the 6th Amendment), as well as the fact he was nearly assassinated and would likely be in jail if it were not for an election.

It’s my impression (in part through reporting) that the Trump White House feels itself in a fight for its life and is advertising its willingness to color outside constitutional lines to bring down its targets. That leaves us staring at a protracted battle between two powerful rule-breaking camps, an unprecedented situation and one I haven’t been sure how to think about. Apparently this hesitation is not genuine. Woodhouse and others who’ve raced back into the TDS camp are certain that though I was right to resist media pile-ons before, “that was then, and this is now,” because “if there’s a suffocating, hegemonic political monoculture today, it’s MAGA.”

MAGA is hegemonic? Really? Exactly the same people consider it exactly as disreputable (more, even). Google search runs in reverse now? Wikipedia bars mainstream sources? NPR isn’t still humming? Harvard isn’t still teaching “Sexual Life of Colonialism?” The unfairly accused have all received apologies? Shit Pulitzers have been given back and newspapers wrote ten billion corrections? When it’s all taken back we can talk. Trump’s in the White House, but his power base is still mostly all voters, and I’m not sure his people are wrong to think they’ve got maybe a year to smash big law, academia, the media, the DC nomenklatura, the EU, and everything else on their shit list before those entities send the hammer right back. They’re probably also right that if Trump fails, we’ll be back to where we were at the moment of the record scratch seven months ago, staring at a more organized and cynical effort at authoritarianism, with more sophisticated plans for higher “guardrails.”

That’s my personal opinion. I could be wrong, but it’s what I think. Or, it’s not what I think, but I owe Jim Jordan a favor and I’m trembling before a massive MAGA readership that a conga line of self-righteous not-at-all cunts apparently knows better than me. Ugh, fuck these people. Fuck them hard. Let’s just be straight with each other. Why does it need to be complicated?