The Times they are a Changin'

Silverfiddle Rant!

Matt Taibbi is one of the many good liberals who have escaped the progressive reservation and now reside in the the citadels of free thought like Substack and UnHerd, from whence they routinely skewer the leftwing wokesters.  Taibbi is still a man of the left, but he is the rare breed who thinks for himself and is not afraid to slaughter sacred cows and topple shibboleths.

Today's censorious totalitarian left hates free thought, and they become hatey confused at people like Joe Rogan, because he doesn't fit the rigthtwing hate totem mold.  But they have no problems attacking unabashed conservatives like Ben Shapiro.  

Matt Taibbi is the ideological opposite of Shapiro, but he enjoys taking down the Old Media when it inadvertently reveals its reactionary agenda.

Taibbi skewers NPR for their inept attack on Ben Shapiro:

Yesterday’s NPR article, “Outrage As A Business Model: How Ben Shapiro Is Using Facebook To Build An Empire,” is among the more unintentionally funny efforts at media criticism in recent times.

The piece is about Ben Shapiro, but one doesn’t have to have ever followed Shapiro, or even once read the Daily Wire, to get the joke. The essence of NPR’s complaint is that a conservative media figure not only “has more followers than The Washington Post” but outperforms mainstream outlets in the digital arena, a fact that, “experts worry,” may be “furthering polarization” in America. NPR refers to polarizing media as if they’re making an anthropological discovery of a new and alien phenomenon.

He describes NPR as "a kind of mass torture experiment, one that makes the most patient and sensible people want to drive off the road in anguish," and then gets to the heart of the matter:

Legacy media is jealous because Ben Shapiro is building an alternative media empire, along with Substack and UnHerd, and they are beyond the reach of the traditional gatekeepers.  Read the Taibbi essay and read the NPR article he is riffing on and the reason for panic on the left becomes clear:  They have lost control of the message.