What Leighton Woodhouse Gets Wrong About Matt Taibbi

And he's wrong about the Trump administration

I don’t think Leighton Woodhouse listens to America This Week with Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn. If he did, he would not claim that Taibbi and Kirn haven’t been hard enough on the Trump administration for speech violations. They have.

His hit piece on Matt Taibbi, whom he says he has “respect” for and calls a friend, before launching into a tirade about how Matt has sold out, is a victim of audience capture and has only Conservative and MAGA readers.

That, plus another takedown in the form of a book, was enough to inspire a lengthy and well-deserved smackdown from Matt on Racket called Ode to Scum, which now has over 1,600 likes and over 1,000 comments.

The first of these says:

It’s a great piece, illustrative of Matt’s talent as a writer:

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?

Now, Woodhouse has written a response:

And:

He questioned his integrity because his integrity is questionable. It is? Based on what? He doesn’t write enough about the war in Gaza? He doesn’t scream about Trump being “just as bad” as the Biden administration?

“Gonzo” style, by the way, is called style. It’s called talent. It’s called the man can write, and that’s why people read him now and always have. Is he using his large platform to do what Leighton Woodhouse and Glenn Greenwald are doing? Not really. There is room for all different kinds of voices in alternative media. That’s what is great about it.

I don’t agree with everything Glenn or Matt says, and don’t need to agree with them. I trust them to tell me the truth about what they think. I think hit pieces are destructive and creepy, especially when they pretend to know the subject’s mind, as this one does.

I come from a world of deception and delusion, where we all functioned as one mind and were never allowed to disagree or dissent. I was a good soldier for the Democrats. I attacked Glenn, Matt, and other free thinkers every day online. I saw them as “the enemy.”

It was the truth I sought as I tumbled out of the Left, and the lantern dropped from the sky. I was lost.

I decided I wouldn’t draw a partisan line and would no longer separate myself between “us and them.” It didn’t matter to me how someone voted, just so long as they were willing to speak out in a time of delusion and deception.

What we lived through in the Trump era, starting with spying on his campaign, through Russiagate and the four indictments, two impeachments, non-stop attacks, is unprecedented in American history. The Twitter Files was a story on par with Watergate, even if the establishment press would never notice or care.

Now, there is an attempt to rewrite history and pretend none of it ever happened, that the FBI wasn’t working with social media to rehearse suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop, that the Democrats weren’t in constant contact with Twitter and Facebook to censor thought and speech.

That there wasn’t an army of fanatics pointing fingers, accusing people, and purging them from utopia, aided by powerful corporations happy to throw people under the bus to save themselves. It did happen. We lived through it, and no, Trump is not “just as bad.” He doesn’t have that kind of power.

The beauty of the American system is freedom of the press, too. But over the past ten years, we watched one political party capture the press in ways we’ve never seen. There was no such thing as holding the powerful to account. There was only one objective: get Trump. There is nothing like that in place now.

Trump is being challenged at every turn, from the mainstream media to activist judges to online power players, and on and on it goes. That is the very definition of holding the powerful to account.

To say Matt’s readers are only Conservatives and MAGA is to betray your ignorance about the thriving ecosystem that exists outside the mainstream. If you don’t know that world, you can’t correctly assess it. Are there plenty of MAGA readers there, like there are on my Substack? Sure. There are also plenty of other kinds of readers, lapsed Leftists like me. It’s the quality of his work that draws readers.

They come for Matt, I think, because they can’t stand that he doesn’t draw the line between “us and them.” They believe they can define “evil” and need other smart people to agree and validate it. If they do not agree, there must be something wrong with them; their integrity is questionable, and they’re doing it for the money. What else could explain it?

I am not here to judge Leighton Woodhouse’s motives. He seems like a decent and honest person to me. I had not heard of him until he wrote a hit piece about Matt. He did, for whatever reason, block me on Twitter. I made him angry enough at one point to do that, though I have no memory of it.

The problem is that I don’t think he reads much of Matt's writing or listens to America This Week. If he did, I don’t think he would have been able to conclude Matt’s critics “have a point.” They don’t. They just want him on their side.

Scipio, Utah