I took out a (discounted) Defector subscription so I could read Dave Roth’s political posts, and I found a whole bunch of good writers creating informative content. Such as Drew Magary, on the Way We (some journamalists choose to) Live Now:
… Let me give you as much background as I can. Taibbi was once a star reporter—the only star reporter, really—at Rolling Stone, making a name for himself not merely for investigating fuckery within the financial sector, but for explaining it clearly to Americans who, at the time, were perhaps not up to speed on the depth and history of that fuckery. Wall Street makes a lot of things overly complicated so that their customers don’t understand it. Taibbi made those things simple. And pointed. This legendary story where he described Goldman Sachs as a “vampire squid” is probably the best illustration of his once formidable talents. I really enjoyed reading his work, so much so that when he asked me (and a handful of other writers) to help contribute to a gimmicky blog post he was compiling, I felt touched by greatness. Who wouldn’t? The guy was Michael Lewis and Anthony Bourdain all in one.
Then in 2017, Taibbi got called out for a lot of ugly shit that he (along with his partner Mark Ames) wrote and did while writing for a gonzo magazine in Russia around the turn of the century. Taibbi issued what appeared to be a sincere apology when that blowback hit him, but it clearly stung him to the point where he decided that he had been wronged by the Woke Police. After that, he left RS and booted up a Substack that enriched him via the now-familiar Free Thinker economy, profiting off the feedback cycle where nu–right wing media stars tell their readers, “I was cast out from the elite, and you might be next!”
That’s the exact same gripe that compelled Elon Musk to buy Twitter and refashion it in his own “I was the class clown you guys!” image. So you see how Musk would find Taibbi (and Bari Weiss) a mark to dump his Twitter Files, and why Taibbi would be willing to act as Musk’s sock puppet in “reporting” them. These are bros who just want the freedom to be bros again. And more important, they want money.
I’m probably giving Taibbi too much credit here (DISCLOSURE: We last corresponded in 2019, when I had quit Deadspin and was reaching out to anyone I knew in hopes of finding new employment), but I think he’s too smart of a guy to actually believe that he’s doing any kind of vital reporting for Musk. I think he knows this is all cynical horseshit, but he’s making a shitload of money in exchange for that horseshit, and that’s all he needs to justify it to himself. It’s good money, and it’s easy. That’s the nut of it.
And do you know what’s odd about the whole thing? It’s that none of these people HAD to stay canceled, if they were ever even canceled to begin with. All of them either forgot about America’s affinity for doling out second chances, or they earnestly believe that said affinity no longer exists. Matt Taibbi, along with many other self-appointed free-speech martyrs, could still be doing great investigative work today, and making a fairly handsome profit off of it. All he had to do was say the right things and then live those values. Someone would have given him a chance. He was just too much of a stubborn, lazy asshole to want it…
From Magary’s original post concerning some of The Worst People on Political Media:
Let’s start with Bari Weiss. I had no idea who that piece of shit was until one of my friends made me aware of her existence. That friend owes me money. Chances are, the only reason YOU know of Weiss isn’t because she used to write for The New York Times, but because people like ME would highlight her pathetic work and go, “Hey man, can you believe the Times pays people like this?” And now I owe YOU money…
Bari Weiss is a nobody. She can’t write. She can’t really do much of anything, outside of checking her personal Google alerts to see who’s destroying Western civilization by daring to make fun of her at any given moment. Weiss belongs to a cottage industry of what I’ll call credible shitposters: Andrew Sullivan, Matthew Yglesias, Bret Stephens, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Jesse Singal, JD Vance, and more. Some of these people are talented. Taibbi was the preeminent watchdog of the finance sector not too long ago. I loved Taibbi’s work. Now he’s writing increasingly reactionary stuff on Substack and making strange arguments about QAnon.
With Rush Limbaugh dead and Trump formally exiled from Twitter, there’s now a massive online power vacuum in a country where the line between being a leader and being a public shithead is indistinct. You can see any number of politicians vying to usurp Trump’s job as Chief Well Poisoner: Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, Josh Hawley, Jim Jordan, Nikki Haley, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and other assorted neo-fascists. But credible shitposters like Vance are ALSO trying to get in on the action…
…[A]chieving that outsider status has proved lucrative. Yglesias, Greenwald, Taibbi, Sullivan, and Weiss all write newsletters that are at the top of Substack’s subscription leaderboard. They each have thousands or even tens of thousands of paying subscribers, and they are making a lot of money off their work. All the culture war scabs these people picked at while at their old jobs, and all the hate-reading that their work induced, has earned them exactly the sort of attention they needed to make the pivot to professional shitposting. That these pivots just so happened to coincide with the rise of a publishing platform that can make writing on one’s own profitable is probably less of a coincidence than it is the result of canny personal branding. And of exploiting their grievances, virtually all of them imagined, without guilt or an editor getting in the way…
Even if you’re amplifying someone like Weiss because you think they suck, and Weiss very much does, you’re amplifying them. You’re doing them a favor, especially now when their income is directly tied to their ability to posture as truth-telling outsiders who make their enemies angry. These fake thinkers—from Sullivan to Limbaugh to fucking Bill Maher—are parasitic organisms: latching onto whatever hosts they can find, feeding off them, and then multiplying within them. That’s how they root themselves deep inside the American culture despite having no good ideas, and certainly no remaining talent to speak of. They exist inside their own feedback loop and foster a massive creative drain that remains ongoing. Their stupidity, their bigotry, and their friends in high places are the only things keeping them relevant. They are a society of assholes, and we lose just as much as they gain from the attention that’s given to them…
Speaking of the Worst Online People:
Huge congrats to @mtaibbi, @bariweiss, @lhfang and all the other people who debased themselves. At least you got a lot of subscribers out of it.
— Centrism Fan Acct ?? (@Wilson__Valdez) January 5, 2023
He banned journalists covering him: 1984. He wants to put a chip in your head: Brave New World. He’s publicly supported government officials and candidates that are banning lessons on actual US history so there’s Fahrenheit 451.
They always misunderstand the literature. pic.twitter.com/Oynd3qSpfx
— Mikey O’Leary (@MichaelROLeary) January 4, 2023
Music Thread Tonight & Postcard Writing Party / Music Thread Announcement
Dopey-o
Frist! What’s that joke about a sandwich, where the more bread you have, the less shit you have to eat?
James E Powell
President Biden should propose a special tax on assholes.
Ken
@James E Powell: Careful. People would die after having theirs sewn shut to avoid the tax.
On second thought, let’s go with it.
Yutsano
You know…the more these rich assholes talk the more I want their paper wealth to disappear overnight.
PJ
Things may be a little simpler with Taibbi. He was always a smug asshole, but in the ’00s he was taking on corporate and political assholes, so it wasn’t as obnoxious if you, too, thought the banks got off scot free for crashing the economy. In 2016, Putin’s man is running for election, and Matt, who spent a decade in Moscow degrading young women and teenagers (of course, according to him, it was all satirical), which I’m sure no government agency ever recorded, suddenly realizes the danger to democracy is not the man who is asking the Russians to provide hacked information so he can win the election, but the people pointing out that the Russians are undermining our democracy. He now has a vested interest in using his smug assholery to support Republicans because it’s not them, or the Russians, who are threatening democracy, it’s the woke Democrats.
bjacques
They sound like plain old hacks, with their best work (if they ever had any) behind them. They’ve always been around—only their funding model has changed. I’m thinking of Walter Winchell, Westbrook Pegler, Walter Duranty, MoDo, David F. Brooks…
RaflW
I have to admit I was darkly amused by this little shit sandwich “Andrew Sullivan, Matthew Yglesias, Bret Stephens”. Hard to think back and acknowledge that I once thought MattY had anything useful or interesting to say. But Magary is right to lump them, and several others, together. Just purveyors of craptasms. Figments of nothing, signifying emptiness, but looking damn near contrarian
eta: Hadn’t seen @Dopey-o‘s comment when I wrote that first sentence. But I suppose this topic does lead there.
eclare
@RaflW: I used to read Sullivan’s The Daily Dish, and I loved the “The View From Your Window” contests. Times sure have changed.
RaflW
@eclare: Yeah, early in the Obama era, my partner got me going on the Daily Dish. I still have a tee shirt! The fabric quality turned out to be far more lasting than his detour into attempted thoughtfulness.
Sully’s reverting to mean after a brief period of apparently seeming to use his noggin just demonstrates that laziness is a powerful force.
(His threads where women wrote in about abortion were quite strong, too. Not that he stopped being a reactionary asshole about choice.)
Oh, and on his old blogroll at the Dish was a link to a site called Balloon Juice. I clicked it. And, well, here I still am.
eclare
@RaflW: I think that is how I got to Balloon Juice too.
OverTwistWillie
“All I’m saying is that if I ever start referring to these as the best years of my life – remind me to kill myself.”
Aussie Sheila
@RaflW: TBH I’ve never understood the ‘respect’ that some usaians have had for Andrew Sullivan.
He always struck me as an Irish Tory a la Burke, investing his meagre social capital in brown nosing his social ‘betters’ in hopes of achieving higher status.
He is and always has been, a fussy, lace curtain Irishman as we say down here, busy trying to prove he is not like those uncouth ‘others’.
He likes the US because it is a more open and egalitarian society than the one from which he hails, but he never lacks for ideas to make it worse, and thinks because he has an ‘English’ accent he will be listened to with the respect he would never achieve in his own country. Pathetic in every sense.
Anne Laurie
IIRC, a lot of ‘The Daily Dish’ was written by uncredited interns — whose only payment was access to Sullivan’s network.
He’s always been a better networker than writer / editor, if the stories from his New Republic days are to be believed.
Ken_L
At least there are some gifted young writers making a name for themselves on social media with courageous, independent, informed commentary. Like, ummm, Candace Owens?
Ruckus
Smug people who make money being smug. They may, once in a while turn out or have turned out a bit of decent writing but money makes a hell of a lot of humans into human waste, so why should they be any different? They are getting older and looking forward to no longer being listened to at some point that’s getting closer every day. But look at what they write, it’s got a time limit, an expiration date, and it’s never that far into the future. They aren’t writing the great novel that will outlive them, they are writing today’s version of bird cage liner. Read today – gone tomorrow. I wonder how many of them know how to make a living doing anything but writing, creating day old sushi?
Craig
Magary and Roth, and others at Defector really pull off the old Charlie Pierce trick or being good writers that can be very clear, insightful, and funny about sports, and politics.
This profile of Big Media Matt is also very good
OverTwistWillie
Drew wields a sharper pen than all those half-wits combined.
Steeplejack
@Anne Laurie:
Like a lot of blogs at the time, Sullivan’s was heavy on aggregated links to other stuff. I don’t remember much of his content, but I did find pathways to good things—including Balloon Juice.
frosty
@RaflW: I was a Dish reader also and it’s quite possible that’s how I ended up here too. The only other blogs I read regularly were TPM dKos and The Oil Drum, and the B-J link would have been unlikely.
Yutsano
Anyone remember pourmecoffee? We used to interact on the Time blog boards when those were a thing. He’s the one who turned me on to this place.
CaseyL
I just can’t get over the fact that these assholes have an audience.
Though, as @bjacques: points out, there is always an audience for assholes to make other assholes feel better about being assholes.
I guess what I don’t understand is why someone wants to go through life being an asshole. It’s like, “When you were a kid, is this what you wanted to be when you grew up? Really?”
mvr
@frosty: I definitely got here from Daily Kos, so you could have as well. I believe it was around 2004. I know it was when Cole was still a Republican – years before I think. Since I lurked I don’t show up until later in that decade and only once or twice iirc.
opiejeanne
@mvr: Pretty sure that’s how I got here, too. and I lurked for years before I posted.
Amir Khalid
@Yutsano:
Like you, I first came here from lurking at TIME’s Swampland blog. And of course I remember pourmecoffee. Kate Tumulty was big on covering healthcare in those days, and way more fun in comments than Joe Klein. Then she went to The Washingtob Post where her husband worked, and her work declined.
Mai Naem mobile
@Aussie Sheila: its his stupid Oxbridge accent which apparently makes everybody assume he’s very smart. I’ve always thought one of the main reasons he was for Obama was for purely selfish reasons – he needed Obama to change the immigration rules since he’s HIV+. He talked about the cost of his HIV meds. I am just really disappointed in Taibbi. I stopped following him a few years ago.
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
@opiejeanne: I got here from dKos as well, I think Baud did too.
David ⛄ 🎅The Establishment🎄 🦌 🕎 Koch
@James E Powell: A Wind-Hole Profits Tax
Feathers
There is a point in a writer’s, or any artist’s, life where they are outsiders, consuming massive amounts of information (and art), to feed their work. When they become successful, there is a lot of time sucked up in the business of art. Many become cut off from their omnivorous input habits, and it shows in their work. Some fade away. Others turn out to be good enough at the business and/or social side of things that their careers survive, or even thrive.
prostratedragon
Oddly enough I just saw a little Hitchcock Presents about the prattling overprivileged, featuring Bette Davis as Dr. Frankenstein sort of. Part 1; part 2.
Kay
I think he’s lying about the book being satire. Perhaps it’s true that (very) young Russian women weren’t attracted to Taibbi and his colleague so did not actually encounter them outside of a work situation, but the whole “American woman apologiing for being ‘politically correct’ is just the decades-old precurser to biolerplate Substack antiwokeness- his current grift.
Any women who has been in the workplace the last 30 years recognizes the women who so wanted to be cool and included they apologized constantly and insisted that requesting to be treated like human beings was “politically correct”, and they’re WAY too cool for that. She’s the only person they would hire as a business manager. Someone who actually told them to stop harrassing and demeaning 17 year old interns at work would no longer be their business manager because they would fire her.
The sin is not demeaning desperate 17 year old girls in Russia. The sin is caring enough about that for one of these glib, shallow, assholes to sneeringly refer to that as “PC”.
Baud
I wonder how many of their subscribers are real. I recall reading that right wingers make the best seller’s list because their books are bought in bulk by affinity groups.
@🐾BillinGlendaleCA: You are correct, sir.
satby
@Amir Khalid: Swampland, and a blog called The Moderate Voice, plus dkos all mentioned this place run by “a reasonable Republican”, so I wandered over. What a lot of changes in the blog posters, the commenters, and the general tenor of the place there’s been! Been a long time since Paul Krugman found anything to cite or Charlie Pierce made a comment here.
lowtechcyclist
Yglesias is the one whose Substack success I don’t get. I can’t see him having a fan base on the right, because he’s really not one of them. And if you’re a contrarian centrist, what’s the appeal? He’s not really that good a writer, and he’s not particularly insightful. I stopped reading his stuff a decade or more ago because there really wasn’t anything he was saying that was worth saying, that someone else hadn’t already said better.
oldster
Nobody is obliged to like what I like, but I do in fact find a lot of value in Matt Yglesias’ writing and analysis.
Baud
@oldster:
I don’t read any of them, but from what I know, MattY does seem to be different from the others on the list.
Betty
Happy to see an article that includes just about all of the writers I can’t stand. Great analysis.
BenCisco 🇺🇸🎖️🖥️♦️
I also arrived here from DK. Never went back.
Barry
@Aussie Sheila: “TBH I’ve never understood the ‘respect’ that some usaians have had for Andrew Sullivan.”
A Brit Twit, living off a quick verbal pseudo-wit.
BellyCat
Magary and Roth are both Olympic medalists in the “Creatively Slay Thine Repugnant Moron” competition. Other contenders would be… (Discuss)
Starfish
@Anne Laurie: The people who wrote for him were always much better writers than he was.
That freaking block of sentient cheese, Conor Friedersdorf, was a better writer than Andrew Sullivan.
Starfish
@Steeplejack: The aggregator blogs were super important in helping us find new content in the pre-Twitter era.
Starfish
@Yutsano: Did pourmecoffee get a Twitter or Mastodon account? The name sounds extremely familiar.
BruceFromOhio
Im glad you enjoy reading Defector. I have two Defector subscriptions because I love what they are doing and the way they’ve elected to go about it, and want them to be successful. The history of the place is a testament to the power of Telling The Man to Fuck Off. Magary, Ratto, Roth, Theisen, Wagner, Nathan, et al, produce quality work on the regular, and have a thriving culture of witty, snarky and intelligent commentariat. While there will be occasional forays into politics, the focus is mainly sports and whatever seems to capture the writers interest (bees, birds, cooking and reading are some fun sidebars). It’s one of few publications that is genuinely worth the money.
Kay
@lowtechcyclist:
I think if you’re a pundit or DC “analyst” or think tanker or lobbyist of some kind you could buy any of these political-topics publications and write them off as business expenses. His would be valuable because (supposedly) people in the WH read it (or say they read it). It would be a legitimate expense.
He writes about what THOSE people would be interested in, not what the broader public or a less well-heeled or powerful section of the workforce would be interested in.
Starfish
@lowtechcyclist: In the beginning, to grow Substack, they were offering to give people money to write for them. Mostly, it was people with niche audiences on the left. Then, they brought in Matt, and paid him much more than everyone. A lot of those little lefty bloggers who had audiences left because they were better writers not getting paid in MattY dollars.
He has stayed on top because he started out on top.
In the post-Twitter era, a lot of people poured back into all sorts of places. Some have been transparent about the uptick in this period. Substack has been quieter, but I bet they have seen more subscribers since then too.
Icarus
@BruceFromOhio:
Yes I cannot recommend Defector highly enough, both for the quality of the writing and for the worker-owned media model they are somehow pulling off. I would strongly suggest anyone who likes sports get a subscription.
Omnes Omnibus
@Starfish:
I think you are right about Yglesias. He started he became a left of center Name in the early days of blogging be cause he was there. He has managed to trim his sails to stay in the public eye, but he is never particularly insightful. He also manages not to offend anyone too badly. He thing reading him is simply a habit that no bothers to break.
OTOH, I have never understood the appeal of Sullivan. One of the people who ruined TNR, lazy thinker, racist, misogynist, hypocritical, but has superficial charm and an almost posh British accent. Christ, I have superficial charm, so it must be the accent.
kent
“Weiss belongs to a cottage industry of what I’ll call credible shitposters: Andrew Sullivan, Matthew Yglesias, Bret Stephens, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Jesse Singal, JD Vance, and more.”
Very strange list. I’m a big fan of Matt Y and Jesse Singal. So I guess I need to give these other folks a chance?
marys
@Baud: Agree. I have gotten less and less interested in Yglesias’s stuff over the years but I don’t know why he’s on this particular list. I don’t subscribe to his Substack so maybe I’m just missing the bad stuff? (I don’t subscribe to any of the people on the list.) All I know is that every once in a while I notice that some mildly contrarian he’s written has set off a big snark storm among people I do still find interesting.
oldster
@kent:
“So I guess I need to give these other folks a chance?“
I assume you phrased that sarcastically or provocatively, but I’ll answer it sincerely:
I am a fan of Yglesias, and you definitely do not have to give Sullivan, Stephens, Greenwald, Taibi, and Vance a chance. They have all proven what they are, many times, and they no longer are contributors to useful discussion. (Sullivan, Greenwald, and Taibi were once useful in various ways and then went off various deep ends; Stephens and Vance were hacks from the word go.)
Singal is a separate question, and how you feel about him will track how you feel about trans issues — that, at least, is the main reason that he has wound up on this list of bad people.
Starfish
@kent: Perhaps you should reconsider rolling with the bros and read some women instead? Heather Cox Richardson is very good.
The way Jesse Singal persecutes trans people and then claims he is the victim is far too much.
Aaron
Whats wrong with MattYglaisias? I mean he’s in my twitter feed which I keep up with.
He’s among a few substackers that I added to my RSS feed but I don’t keep up with my RSS feed like I used to.