Self-described old-school liberal Matt Taibbi, a veteran journalist, sat down with The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro on this week’s episode of “Sunday Special,” highlighting various topics such as Americans’ overall distrust in national institutions—namely the media—and the radical shift in the Democratic Party.
Taibbi joined Shapiro’s weekly show to share the backlash he faced from now-former friends for reviewing The Daily Wire’s recent groundbreaking documentary “What is a Woman?.” He said “dinosaur” liberals like him “are no longer welcome” in the so-called New Left.
“[It’s] taken a dramatic turn towards censoriousness and toward a more authoritarian approach to some problems,” Taibbi said. “There’s a belief that the old leftist approach or the old liberal approach is ineffective … we’ve all been sort of kicked out of the club.”
Taibbi said growing up, “there would have been no thought at all of conservatism as an attractive ideology for a young person.”
But with the political left essentially losing its sense of humor over the last decade, which he said once upon a time used to be the exclusive province of the liberal mindset, joking is no longer allowed on his side of the aisle. For Taibbi, who grew up listening to comedians Richard Pryor and Sam Kinison, those days have changed, noting The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh used that former style of sense of humor and satirical bent in “What is a Woman?”
“That’s sort of taboo on our side of the aisle now,” he said. “Which I find really strange because that shift happened almost overnight and imperceptibly.”
Liberalism began facing a dramatic change in the 2016 Presidential Election, Taibbi said during Shapiro’s “Sunday Special.” At that point in his career, Taibbi had covered five election campaigns for Rolling Stone.
While writing a campaign story about a pro-union and lifelong Democrat voter from Wisconsin— who for the first time voted Republican because of the deception he felt from North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA—Taibbi said he faced pushback the leftist media community claiming he validated the economic insecurity argument rather than focusing on Trump’s alleged racism and xenophobia.
“Suddenly their telling us as reporters, we can’t include something that’s true because it goes against some kind of narrative—that was crazy,” he said. “I had never seen that in journalism before, and that was a signal to me that something big was going on.”
He later went on to say that “people implicitly distrust anyone who doesn’t want you to listen to someone else’s argument,” which used to attract him to liberalism.
But that attitude has shifted and turned into a stance where liberal media and thought have to do everything they can “to stamp out disinformation or misinformation” as if it would positively impact audiences.
Completely silencing the other side of an argument in the hope that one lasting opinion remains is a “losing strategy,” according to Taibbi.
However, the media wasn’t the only institutional rot subverting American society. Taibbi also pointed to scandals that stemmed from alphabet agencies like the FBI and NSA to the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis, the Iraq War, and COVID-19.
Taibbi worked as a reporter for Rolling Stone for 15 years until announcing his resignation in 2020. He now continues journalism independently using Substack.
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Source: Dailywire
