Meet the Real Elites

Maybe it's the pundits telling you who to believe

The pains of this election come in waves like the plagues of Egypt. After the initial shock and horror died down, next comes the insufferable smugness of the pro-Trump independent journalists. If you spend any time on social media platforms amidst the protruding skeletal frame of legacy media’s beached corpse then you’ll recognise the names of a few of the circling vultures. Chief among them Matt Taibbi, of course, but you’ve got your Bari Weiss, Glenn Greenwald, Jonathan Chait, Lee Fang, Michael Shellenberger, et cetera.

These aren’t pundits in the style of Tucker Carlson or Megyn Kelly, they’re not so far to the right that they’re cutting eye holes out of their pillow cases. In so far as they can be grouped together I’ve seen people float pejoratives like alt-left or post-left. I have no idea if they consider themselves to inhabit a category in the tradition of the incredibly cringeworthy “Intellectual Dark Web” of some years back. But they do undoubtedly consider themselves the intellectual wing of the Trump movement, often preferring to be seen less as pro-Trump than they are anti-Democrat, and looking down on the common Trump supporter every bit as much as on the common Democrat as all little more than vulgar human refuse.

I coined a term for a certain type of person who I don’t think otherwise has a really good term but I think everyone will know them when they see them or try to listen to them talk. I call them polluxes, due to their resemblance to the character Pollux Troy, Nic Cage’s character’s brother in the movie Face/Off.

These people are infuriating in a way that triggers a very ancient evolutionary marker in the primordial sub-basements of our brains, an instinct that makes our fists ball up because it dates to a time before spears when we had to punch our prey to death. They know they’re infuriating and they revel in being infuriating, but here’s the thing—they don’t understand why they’re infuriating. They think it’s because they’re winning. It’s not.

The best visual marker of a pollux is that they are making this face most of the time, but particularly when they think they’re owning a lib.

You’ll see a lot of celebratory snark coming from their general direction for a while about how the “elites” have been defeated at last, but you won’t find any definitions of “elite” because they’re counting on you simply mentally associating the term with people who authoritatively tell you things you either disagree with or don’t want to know.

But who are the elites? Taibbi uses this word a lot and certainly doesn’t seem to think it applies to himself, someone who was born into a prominent media family and is widely considered the heir to an entire subgenre of postmodern creative non-fiction.

When you actually break it down and try to define elite in the way that they want you to define it, you’ll see that it makes almost no sense, often comically so. The elites, in Trump world, are a vast group consisting of CNN journalists, Hollywood actors, musicians, union leaders, climatologists, epidemiologists, your high school teachers, your doctor, and evil billionaires who invest in charities, healthcare, and nonprofits.

Counter to that, the heroic fighters of the elites are… Rupert Murdoch, Alex Jones, the Trump family, and good billionaires who smash unions, fight against public health, invest in debunked race science, go on TV, and tell you to go fuck yourself.

I read something the other day that I think might be the most astute “nailed it” observation I’ve ever read about the definition of “elite” and I’m upset that I didn’t note down where I saw it so I can properly credit it—please inform me in the comments if you know—but it’s simply: When saying “elite,” the left means plutocrats, while the right means technocrats. They talk past each other because neither side is using the same frame of reference.

I take a different point of view. The definition of “elite” that works best for me is these Pollux assholes who have become the Mouth of Sauron for the plutocracy. They tell their audience what they want to hear—your gut instincts about these mendacious so-called experts is correct—and they will do the dirty work of insulting the people you hate in better words than you could while you cheer at the sidelines. “Get ‘em, big bro!”

These guys all talk about freedom of speech as one of the most important principles of society, and I agree with them. I actually agree with them more than they agree with them, because for all their big talk about freedom of speech they are really just talking about something specific, conditional, and frankly less honest than I am.

With predictable frequency, their beef isn’t so much with censorship as it is with censorship’s second cousin who is often mistaken for censorship: Cancellation.

Lee Fang, one of the polluxes currently doing victory laps around Kamala Harris’ failed campaign, had a pretty unique postmortem to this effect:

So that’s… That’s weird. That’s a weird thing to say. Imagine being 11 years old in 2017 and your hero, 64 year old millionaire film producer Harvey Weinstein(???), gets prosecuted for all those rapes he did, and your first thought for some reason is “Oh shit, I’m next.” Or is Fang actually talking about Bill Cosby here? Which rapist’s comeuppance at the start of the MeToo period did Lee think went too far?

Fang is no stranger to cancellation already. As recently as 2020 he certainly wouldn’t seem like the kind of guy who would be crowing about a second Trump term, writing glowing pieces about JD Vance and sticking it to the left and dismantling “woke” culture. Fellow pollux Jonathan Chait described Fang back then as almost insufferably left-wing and “well to the left” of the Democratic party.

But then, during the Black Lives Matter protests, he tweeted out some things that, rightly or wrongly, were interpreted by some readers, including one of his black journalist colleagues at the Intercept, as racially insensitive or racist. As these public arguments often go, Fang’s attempts to turn the thing around spiralled into what he regards to be a cancellation.

Now, Fang gripes about free speech and wokeness and writes on subjects that closely resemble Men’s Rights activism, the right wing answer to feminist activism that is known for its propensity to attract charlatans and grifters.

Fang was one of the journalists who won (in what I like to imagine resembled a Squid Game style competition) the opportunity to earn Elon Musk’s approval by running a bunch of hit pieces on Twitter’s pre-Musk administration that they called The Twitter Files. I have no idea how Musk picked people for this project but it turned out basically the entire rogues gallery of these guys, with Matt Taibbi its chief provocateur.

I’ve been asked before why I bother going after Matt Taibbi so much when he’s just one whiny prick stuck between the teeth of a democracy that’s under assault by much bigger adversaries. But yes, he does, I think, do some actual damage. What he stands for and what he fights for, and a mission of which he has largely become the smirking punchable face, is wholly incompatible with and opposed to my own.

Here he is, for example, celebrating Trump’s pick of Brendan Carr for head of the FCC. Brendan Carr is a media censorship bulldog whose sees it his mission to go after networks and publications that have been too critical of Trump, to dismantle them or shut them down, as well as shutting down watchdog organizations in the private sector that track or identify disinformation.

Pretty weird for a guy whose entire thing is opposing censorship to get all cramped in the pants over that, but then there’s some doublethink happening here. Carr calls these media outlets and organizations “the censorship cartel” because what he and Taibbi mean by censorship is cancellation. Watchdogs like NewsGuard threaten Taibbi’s elite position by pointing out his bullshit, which he sees as a type of censorship, and in fact the worst type.

I have this big thing about education being one of the most important missions of human civilization and one of the most important things for any government to ensure its citizens have access to. It’s that and healthcare, basically, right up at the top. Taibbi stands in the way of both of these things largely because they both imply the existence and technical authority of experts who know better than he does about stuff.

Not through some genuine reverence for the free press as the backbone of society or anything like that, mind you, but for a much more personal and narcissistic obsession. He’s a popular writer—credit where it’s due, a hard working one—who almost tasted real fame, and I’m talking Norman Mailer fame, but flew too close to the sun and has spent the rest of his career chasing something he believes he’s owed.

Taibbi has a long and fascinating career biography, and—you’ll definitely think I’m telling some kind of bizarre joke whose punchline doesn’t land, here, but trust me, I’ve provided a link—it kind of started when he jacked off a horse so he could throw a bowl of stallion cum at a rival journalist.

This was a weird time in history and it made sense at that time. He was part of a new crop of writers operating abroad out of Russia in a tradition of scumbag journalism that did well on the early internet. Pranks like this evidently reminded people of Hunter S. Thompson, the godfather of “gonzo” journalism, an 80s wave of creative non-fiction that embraced and accentuated, rather than marginalized, the journalist’s personal bias and role within the story.

Hunter Thompson wasn’t even dead yet in 2001 when Taibbi committed what would probably today be regarded a felony biological hazard attack on another man’s face, one that only Elon Musk would still find funny, but it apparently reminded people of Hunter and these were the days when pop culture was still looking at Hunter Thompson as the next New Thing and were trying to establish a whole franchise of Thompsons like mall Santas, and look, I’m not saying that’s why he shot himself but under the circumstances I might have done that too.

Taibbi, like Thompson, earned himself a Rolling Stone gig, in which he wrote the only thing that most people actually know him for—one line in a 2010 article that says of Goldman Sachs:

The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.

This particular turn of phrase hit exactly the right button at exactly the right time, and it’s one line that has carried his career—much to his dismay. The Vampire Squid is to Taibbi what Wonderwall is to Liam Gallagher: It’s not what he considers his best work and it doesn’t even reflect his current worldview but people think it’s catchy and it’s the only thing about his career they’ll ever fucking reference.

Taibbi  wrote some serious work post-vampire-squid and began to discover structural racism in 2014, when he was covering the aftermath of the financial crisis:

I decided to look into who does go to jail in America and why, and I started to become overwhelmed by all these horrible, horrible stories about injustices that were being done to ordinary people who didn’t have money. One of the first days I went out, I heard about a thirteen-year-old, mentally disabled, African American boy in Brooklyn who’d been picked up by a couple of cops, and they’d thrown him in the back of a squad car and told him that he couldn’t go home that day ’til he helped them find an illegal gun. And so he ended up telling them there was a gun at his grandmother’s house, and they descended upon that kid’s grandmother’s house, they hauled in the grandmother, they hauled in the kid, the hauled in the kid’s brother—it’s terrible.

I heard story after story. A woman gets arrested, an undocumented immigrant in Los Angeles who gets arrested for driving without a license, and she’s sentenced to 170 hours of community service and a $1,700 fine, and she has to take her kids to the community service every night. She’s crying herself to sleep every night.

In 2017, Taibbi tried to diversify away from his reputation as the last Hunter S. Thompson Mall Santa and write a “serious” book, I Can’t Breathe, about the racially charged police murder of Eric Garner.

The book that should have made Taibbi a liberal darling and a hero of the Black Lives Matter movement unfortunately backfired as all that Hunter Thompson shit he did 20 years ago came back to haunt him. Insidious NPR journalists had the absolute gall to question him, during what should have been his Norman Mailer reinvention, about all the wacky crazy and sometimes kinda rapey but also satirical and also totally fine stuff he was writing about in Russia in the Bush years.

I haven’t read Taibbi’s entire back catalogue of crazy Russian adventures but by almost all accounts, even among his critics, it really was satirical and/or fictional. I don’t even really know if smacking that guy in the face with horse semen was really a true story but it’s all beside the point. Taibbi’s encounter with, and cancellation by, the morality mob led to a long sort-of-apology in which he attempted to throw his co-writer under the bus to save himself but it couldn’t save his book and he has never recovered from the experience.

His precious book, the opus that was supposed to earn him a passkey to a special club of progressive elites he hadn’t yet accessed, though his line about the Vampire Squid had got his first foot in that door. There’s a saying about closing a door and opening a window, though, and Taibbi knew this wasn’t the only elite club to join. So he decided to marry the Squid.

He’s spent the rest of his career tackling topics of censorship, but again, he frequently confuses censorship with the cancellation he experienced. Concerns of actual government surveillance and interference with lawful speech get all mixed up together with stuff like forum moderation and fact-checking. Even accurate fact-checking.

It was this work that earned him the job of being the flagship for The Twitter Files. In this he saw another shot at the big time, but the trade-off he was going to have to accept was joining forces with the biggest Vampire Squid in history, by net worth.

To earn Elon Musk’s trust, Taibbi was going to have to throw a lot out the window of what he’d previously purported to believe about class and structural racism, but it wasn’t a difficult transition once he was willing to burn some bridges. Elon had already developed an immense cult following that Taibbi could tap into—far rightists and conspiracy theorists who saw fact-checking, expert consensus, and education as a threat against their freedom of expression because it was constantly countering what they knew in their hearts to be true.

To re-enter elite world, Matt Taibbi had to switch his enemies, from the plutocrats to the technocrats. Now it is the billionaire class and the Republican oligarchy who are the powerful heroes protecting the gates of free expression from the incoming hordes of academics and teachers and so-called experts who want to indoctrinate your kids into thinking vaccines are effective, sexual identities are valid, and the environment is under threat.

To establish his relationship with Musk, a man whose net worth is matched only by his emotional and psychological weakness, Taibbi had to promise not to challenge or criticise him in public—a deal that earned him to shortage of professional ridicule when it became public knowledge. One of the surest ways to royally piss Matt Taibbi off is to suggest that Musk paid him for his Twitter Files work, which is a frequent accusation. For what it’s worth, I believe Matt, but that actually makes it sadder to me, because it means his continued sycophancy is something he’s offering for free.

It was, in the end, all for nought—Elon Musk is not, it turns out, anti-censorship. Neither is Matt Taibbi. The best that can be said about either of them on the topic is that they are both so convinced of their own infallibility that even strenuous disagreement with views they agree with is a form of censorship if it comes with the authority of expertise, but actual censorship of views they oppose is merely justifiable self-defense.

Musk is also a paranoid control-obsessed lunatic, so he won’t accept people publishing content on platforms that he doesn’t control. When he demanded that Taibbi shut down his Substack publication and publish exclusively on Twitter, Taibbi’s pushback resulted in Musk not only censoring Taibbi’s own Twitter account but permanently hiding all tweets that contain a link to a Substack publication.

As someone who runs one of those myself… thanks, Matty.

But despite their falling-out, Taibbi will still not criticise Musk outside of the very narrow fact that Musk has shadowbanned his account—a fact that he clings to solely as a shield to defend himself from accusations that he’s beholden to the billionaire. This entails not only defending Musk’s (successful, it turns out) attempts to use the brute force of his capital to hijack democracy…

But even vociferously defending Elon Musk’s direct acts of censorship, where the censorship is in line with media outlets that Taibbi also has beef with.

The reason that he can’t attack Musk even if he wanted to on any of these behaviours that seem to contradict everything Matt otherwise stands for is because his core audience now almost entirely derives from the Venn overlap between MAGA and the Elon cult. On the Trump front, also, Matt is forbidden from criticising Trump’s extremely open and direct threats to shut down entire publications for reporting negatively about him.

Matt now claims to be a full-throated Trump supporter who voted for him this year and regrets not having done so previously. Accepting the keys to this elite kingdom has required that he throw out a lot of the older work, especially his failed opus on structural racism and the Garner murder. It wasn’t too long after becoming a MAGA guy that he started reading dutifully from the script, like incredibly randomly attacking transgender people as though he had a box to tick off that day.

The new script requires that he throw an occasional bone to the White Pride and anti-immigration sets. Taibbi regularly lambasts the accusation that he has white privilege even while knowing full well that nobody will be stopping him in the street to ask for his papers when his new Republican hero’s ICE troops come marching through his home town, eyeballing people for Latin features or complexion that’s a little too African-black. How many knees are going to land on how many necks and how many shits will he give this time?

Of course it’s not fair to blame Matt for that, he’s not one to go on tirades against Mexicans, and deportations were going to happen and bombs were going to drop in Gaza no matter which way he voted. The important thing, what he really cares about, is that the people he hates, white liberals and leftists, will also see the atrocities and they will be sad about it. Their sadness is their penance for crossing him, personally.

The acrobatics involved with shifting loyalties to maintain one’s elite status leads one to some astonishing acts of hypocracy, and one of my favourites to date is Taibbi launching merciless barbs at Don Lemon for performatively leaving Twitter…

Just months after doing the exact same thing himself, more pathetically.

The difference is that Don Lemon had the balls to actually follow through.

Despite my frequent barbs in his direction, Matt Taibbi doesn’t even take the crown for the biggest hypocrites of the elite pollux set. Biggest douche, possibly, but not biggest hypocrite. That award must go to Michael Shellenberger, the guy Musk swapped Taibbi out for as his most loyal sycophant.

There’s kind of a pipeline for all these guys that, for some reason, starts at classical liberalism and ends at InfoWars, and to be honest I haven’t figured out all the ins and outs of it. Matt Taibbi, for what it’s worth, isn’t even as far down the pipeline as Glenn Greenwald, the Pulitzer Prize-alumnus pollux (try that tongue-twister) who has gone on to sadly wind up collaborating with Alex Jones for some reason and thus somehow joining the below-the-sub-basement tier journalism inhabited by Roger Stone and David Icke.

Shellenberger’s current journalistic breakthrough, as I write this, is testifying before Congress about his research regarding UFO retrieval operations that may or may not reveal the existence of interplanetary and/or interdimensional nonhuman biological intelligences that may or may not be collaborating with the Biden administration from an underwater base.

Whether or not these life forms are conspiring to shadowban conservatives from Twitter iis unclear, but their role in this conspiracy cannot be ruled out, as Shellenberger is another Twitter Files author whose commitment to the cause of anti-censorship has been entirely dependent on which way his MAGA audience leans on any given issue.

Jesse Singal is another post-left-ish independent journalist with a polluxy personality, and I do hesitate to use one pollux as a source against another because what are we even doing here, but no matter what your opinion about Singal’s credibility on other certain topics (and believe me, I am not ordinarily in his camp), Singal’s reporting on his own beef with Shellenberger’s dipshittery is so comprehensive and accurate that it would be redundant and borderline plagiarism for me to go over it all. So, skip it or read it and take a shower or something.

Long story short, Shellenberger has a crazy hard-on for media censorship despite his cred as a Taibbi collaborator and a Twitter Files alumnus as well as a phenomenal lack of journalistic competence. He has a weird and repetitive tendency to accuse people of being spies or CIA agents because he either gets basic research wrong or just fucking mixes up people’s names. His contribution to the pantheon of pollux elites is being “the weird one” whose antagonism toward the CIA is based less on Mercury Rising and more on Men In Black.

And yet. We all sing together: Society waits for you.

I talked earlier about my antagonism toward these people from an educational point of view. I wrote about this previously. The Twitter Files and what these populism-surfing hacks have pushed in an attempt to capture some of that MAGA/Musk cult bucks has formed the backbone of what might wind up being the most censorious and anti-education regime in history, by Trump’s own proud admission, dismantling education with the truly Orwellian goal of preserving speech by outlawing knowledge.

Buckle up, we have a fight ahead of us.