We all have our favorites in the media world, and along with Bari Weiss, Nellie Bowles, and Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi fits the bill. 

I have been a paying subscriber to his Substack for a long while now, and if I add up all my paid subscriptions it turns out I spend a lot more on independent media than the Pravda Media I have to read for my job. (Hey, Salem, it would be nice to get a reimbursement. Just sayin'.)

That's noteworthy because in many cases I am paying as much or even more to read one or two authors than I am for the output from the entire New York Times staff, and I still consider these subscriptions a great deal even though the aggregate price makes me wince. 

That is because the independent media is a "no bulls**t zone." I don't always agree with what I read (Glenn Greenwald, for instance, alternatively infuriates and impresses me), but because I get to read real analysis from diverse points of view and in total the aggregate of all the viewpoints helps me think more deeply about any issue. 

That's what freedom of speech is supposed to do, right? Real diversity of viewpoints frees us to think for ourselves. 

Yesterday's rant from Taibbi was pure gold. It was an equal mix of passion and analysis, and Taibbi pulled no punches. 

We paid an English subcontractor to create dummy Ukrainian social media accounts to post content in line with “U.S. foreign policy objectives.” So glad our tax dollars aren’t going to waste! https://t.co/lDsdjBUcz5 pic.twitter.com/GgtTV7BK9l

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 3, 2025

Matt comes from a family steeped in old-fashioned journalism, and one thing he learned was how to sniff out the BS. Any time he sees a Narrative™--the prepackaged propaganda that is fed to us constantly--he recoils and digs a bit deeper. That is why he was so good reporting the Twitter Files, and that is why he is well worth the price of admission. 

I mean, c'mon. That is a great headline.

Matt is celebrating, and I hope not prematurely, the demise of Zelenskyy's "Winston Churchill" image that Pravda and the transnational elite have carefully crafted. Whether you think that, on balance, supporting Ukraine's war on Russia is the right move or not, the image of Zelenskyy and the heroic struggle of brave Ukrainians against Russian "orcs" is a prepackaged narrative that simplifies a more complicated reality. 

Putin has made clear for more than a decade that Ukrainian admission into NATO was a casus belli, and it is objectively true that many of the fighters on the Eastern Front are in fact Nazi sympathizers, so the outbreak of the war should have surprised few people. Putin is a tyrant and an objectively bad guy, but Ukraine and NATO bear some responsibility for saying they were going to cross Putin's red line. If somebody says "I will go to war to prevent X, and you say X will happen, don't pretend to be shocked that war was the result. 

Taibbi's lede is great:

From the BBC’s “Starmer gives Zelensky ‘full backing’ in warm No 10 welcome” today:

Sir Keir Starmer has told Volodymyr Zelensky he has "full backing across the United Kingdom" as the two met in Downing Street.

The Ukrainian president told the prime minister he was happy his country had “such friends” after arriving in the UK in the wake of a White House meeting with US President Donald Trump that descended into a row between the two leaders…

I read that headline as “Starmer gives Zelensky ‘full backrub,’” which might have been more accurate. The Zelensky World Tour for the last week now includes punking the White House, lecturing America for its insufficient billions, getting yelled at for having “no cards” by a furious Donald Trump (who took offense “on Putin’s behalf,” not the taxpayer’s, according to the New York Times), then instantly backtracking on X and opening the door to a NATO-less solution. Afterward, he fled across the pond to England, where he offered to resign in exchange for NATO admission before dismounting into the arms of Starmer, who eased urgency toward a settlement by pledging to stand with Ukraine “for as long as it may take.”

Zelensky’s transformation from affable populist to Anne Applebaum’s idea of a sex symbol was off-putting even before he started appearing before swooning legislators around the world wearing his trademark wan face and “I Saved The World From Putin and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt” costume. We just spent three years turning a fixable local issue into a test case for a new ethos of imperial intransigence, one that apparently requires constant weeding of unbelievers and full control of media to preserve “democracy.” Zelensky may not have started as a hawk for this global Misinformation is Murder movement, but once he realized selling the idea was a requirement for NATO’s billions, he threw himself into the role with gusto. Now, he’s refusing to give up the part.

Tell us what you really think, Matt. Don't hold back. 

Unlike many people out there, I don't feel hostile to Zelenskyy. He has been in a tough spot with his country invaded, the promises made to him by manipulative elites have gone unfulfilled, and he has been held up as a heroic fighter for freedom while feeling strung along when it came to actual promises made to him. 

I get it. He has his interests, and while he keeps getting told that our interests align with his, he isn't feeling the love. 

Europeans have been blowing smoke up his rear end about how great he is, and he has bought the propaganda himself. He thinks they really mean that he is Western Civilization's savior, and if his friends get to skim a bit or a lot off the top, that is their due for saving the world. 

It must be a heady feeling to know that almost all the world's great powers are on your side, and more than a little confusing to see that they keep sending just enough weapons to maintain a stalemate that costs tens of thousands of Ukrainian lives. 

Donald Trump comes along and declares "bulls**t" when told he must help Zelenskyy maintain the stalemate, while Zelenskyy still seems to believe that all these elites really mean to help him defeat the Russian Bear and take Vladimir Putin out. 

Placed in an impossible situation when Russian forces massed on his border in early 2022, Zelensky at first pursued a strategy of speaking his mind. He criticized Americans for withdrawing diplomats from Kyiv pre-invasion, saying, “We do not have a Titanic situation here.” American officials complained he was “poking us in the eye” with comments that were “mind-boggling,” adding they were “puzzling” over his apparent optimism about a deal with Russia. They preferred he take a different approach, one in line with a new American idea about “information warfare” that didn’t permit local politicians to act like they had a say in how America chose to conduct wars on their territories.

Before Russia invaded, American officials announced in a series of high-profile features in the New York Times that it planned to “beat the master at his own game” by using the press to engage in “information warfare,” claiming it was difficult to go “toe-to-toe with an autocratic state” if the U.S. couldn’t also flood the media zone with untrammeled propaganda. The first target of “information warfare” was said to be Putin. By releasing intelligence in papers like the Times, we were told, he might be stunned by our level of insight into his operations and “reconsider the political, economic and human costs of an invasion.” Pre-invasion, America’s former ambassador to Ukraine even told us the new strategy was working, that “Putin has already blinked” and was now “looking for a way out.”

That smoke being blown up Zelenskyy's backside was unlikely to be nicotine laced, but rather something a bit stronger if he started believing his own and the Western Powers' propaganda. It wasn't real. It was The Bulls**t as Taibbi calls it. 

Tanks rolled anyway three weeks later, after which we were told there was a new target of “information warfare”: ordinary people, including Ukrainians and the foreign populations supporting them. Our leading media outlets now filled with heroic stories of Ukrainian resistance, including the eerily Bastogne-like “Go fuck yourself” tale of Snake Island Ukrainians choosing death over surrender to a Russian warship, or portraits of the mysterious “Ghost of Kyiv,” a MiG-29 fighter pilot who “dominates the skies” with his supersonic “brass balls.” The story was repeated over channels like MSNBC even after it came out that the key images had been stitched together from old Twitter posts and a flight simulator program:

The Times in pointing out that these stories proved mythical noted they “do not compare to the falsehoods being spread by Russia,” and that it was “important” to “keep morale high among the fighters and marshal global support for their cause.” A senior fellow at the New America Foundation, Peter Singer, said, “If Ukraine had no messages of the righteousness of its cause, the popularity of its cause, the valor of its heroes, the suffering of its populace, then it would lose.” He added that in the social media age, audiences are targets and participants, so sharing such images “makes them combatants of a sort as well.”

We were no longer just readers about the conflict in Ukraine, but a type of soldier in battle. By swallowing tales like the “Ghost of Kyiv,” we were “doing our part,” to put it in Starship Troopers terms. But how to square this with the movement against “misinformation”? 

Information war wasn't just directed at Russia, but at all of us. We were being self-consciously manipulated to serve the greater good, which shouldn't surprise us I suppose, but does call into question why people keep falling for it. 

Have we learned nothing? When The New York Times basically admits it supports lying to people, why don't we believe them?

Our intelligence community facilitated the censorship of Americans' speech to ensure we all "did our part." And that part was to believe the Ukrainian line, and hence Ukrainian lies. 

[There was a] broad-scale program in which the Ukrainian secret service, the SBU, sent lists of accounts it wished to ban to the FBI, which in turn sent those requests to American platforms. We thought it was a scoop when a letter from the FBI’s San Francisco office to Twitter asking to remove Canadian journalist Aaron Maté along with hundreds of other accounts was found in the Twitter Files.

That was just one item on a giant conveyor belt of SBU requests to Twitter, Instagram, and other outlets. The House Weaponization of Government Committee later found the SBU induced the FBI to pass on requests to remove 15,865 posts across 5,165 Facebook accounts, and even requested (by mistake, possibly) the removal of the official Russian language Instagram account of the US State Department, @USAPoRusski. When colleague Lee Fang managed to contact Ilya Vitiuk, head of Ukraine’s cybersecurity service, and asked how he differentiated “Russian disinformation” from legitimate content, Vitiuk explained, “I say, ‘Everything that is against our country, consider it a fake, even if it’s not.’”

That's right. The Ukrainian SBU determined who could say what in America and the West. 

Who is the threat to our freedom again? Putin may be a bad guy and all, but he isn't taking away my rights. My own government is helping Ukraine do so instead. 

Not long after we saw American media shrug off the death in Ukrainian custody of writer and YouTuber Gonzalo Lira. While he was in jail, The Independent set the tone, suggesting the United States should not ask the recipient of billions its aid to free one of its citizens: “An American ‘Putin propagandist’ was jailed in Ukraine. Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk want him freed.” The Daily Beast did better: “How a Sleazy American Dating Coach Became a Pro-Putin Shill in Ukraine.” When Lira died, the headlines featured lines like “Kremlin Shill Died in Ukraine” and “Pro-Putin Expat Dies in Ukrainian Jail.” Ukraine meanwhile banned the World Socialist Web Site and jailed local writer Bogdan Syrotiuk, a cause that didn’t animate the American left much, perhaps because it lacked a Trump angle.

If you’re keeping score, the Ukraine war established American officials could plant deceptions in media as part of “information warfare”; Pro-Ukraine deceptions would be tolerated to maintain “morale”; Russian media was blocked officially in Europe and quasi-officially here; individual posts of Americans were routinely removed or deamplified, sometimes at the behest of Ukraine; and leaks of true information running counter to our own state media narratives would be harshly punished. We banned foreign state media, and essentially mandated fealty to our version at home.

Taibbi's rant goes on, and he provides the receipts for everything he says. He lays out--with evidence that comes from the Pravda Media itself most often--their justification for lying to the American people, silencing all opposition, and even giving Ukraine the ability to choose which Americans can say what. 

All this to save democracy or some such excuse. 

I encourage you to read the whole thing, not just because it is satisfying to read such a well-argued piece and have all the evidence laid out, but because Taibbi cuts through the bulls**t and lays it all out there. 

It's important to support people doing great work, because there is so little of it out there. 

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