How Not to Advocate for Free Speech

Matt Taibbi and the political polarization of free expression

Matt Taibbi circa 2010s

I have a new piece out in Queer Majority examining facts versus perceptions when it comes to the “TQ+” portion of the LGBTQ+ community: “The Phantom ‘Queer’ Menace.”

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Once upon a time, the political left were the champions of free speech. But the times, they’ve been a-changin’. In the 1960s, universities stood at the vanguard of the Free Speech Movement. Today, they have become places where speech goes to be endlessly deconstructed, constrained, stigmatized, rioted against, and shouted down. According to the 2024 Spotlight on Speech Codes report from FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), a mere 12.9 percent of the 489 schools they examined earned a “green light” score for speech policies that “do not seriously imperil free expression.” The ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) used to defend the speech rights of neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Westboro Baptist Church. Today, they not only routinely decline to defend so-called “hate speech”, high-ranking ACLU officials now call for book bannings.

Free speech has disastrously become a polarized issue, but with partisan crisis comes partisan opportunity. The erosion of left-institutional support for free expression created a market for pro-speech and anti-censorship news coverage and commentary — one dominated by right-of-center audiences. And thus the negative feedback loop began. The louder free speech advocacy grew on the right, the more rank-and-file progressives came to mistakenly view free expression as a right-coded issue. But, in all fairness, too many speech advocates in recent years have both greatly enabled and profited from this spiral of left-wing speech-skepticism.

A recent case in point, and one that hits close to home for me, involves the journalist and author Matt Taibbi. In late March, Taibbi, who has been covering issues surrounding free speech and censorship for the past few years, found himself trending on Twitter as the result of a spat with fellow reporter Zaid Jilani. The feud erupted over a Substack note Taibbi had posted in which he explained why his reporting, which was once politically wide-ranging, now no longer criticizes Republicans or the political right. Jilani accused Taibbi of abandoning his principles in order to pander to his large, recently amassed, and lucrative right-wing audience. Matt Taibbi’s arc is worth taking a closer look at because it offers an important lesson. The fact that free speech is increasingly seen as a “right-wing dog whistle” on the left is as dismaying as it is truly insane. But if First Amendment advocates harp on speech and censorship in a way that exclusively bashes the left, we only feed this narrative, and by extension, the destructive polarization wearing away at speech rights.

Matt Taibbi used to be a progressive darling. As a star reporter for Rolling Stone, he produced some of the most incisive, witty, and widely read reporting on the 2008 financial crisis, including his celebrated 2009 article “The Great American Bubble Machine.” His book-length exposés of foreign policy, the financial crash, and the justice system — The Great Derangement (2008), Griftopia (2010), and The Divide (2014) — all became New York Times bestsellers. James Wolcott described him as “The funniest angry writer and the angriest funny writer since Hunter S. Thompson roared into town.” Taibbi’s writing, which won him a 2008 National Magazine Award, made such inroads in the culture that Eric Bates, a former senior editor at Rolling Stone, recounted, “We had interviewed Obama a number of times and we would get reader questions asking, ‘What’s he like?’ We started to get that with Matt. ‘What’s he like?’ No one does that with a writer. Most people in the world aren’t curious about what a writer is like as a person.”

Now, Taibbi’s erstwhile left-leaning fans regard him as a right-wing shill, despite his insistence that his politics have not changed. As someone who is accused of being a right-winger on a weekly basis despite not being one, I sympathize with Taibbi’s plight. I am acutely aware that the moment someone trespasses beyond the ever-shrinking boundaries of acceptable thought on the political left, they can expect to be pilloried as a reactionary ghoul hardly removed from an avowed fascist. But it’s more than just sympathy I feel toward Matt Taibbi — I like him. I’ve been an avid reader of his for more than 15 years. I’m a paying subscriber to his publication, Racket News. He’s a wonderfully colorful writer whose style has influenced my own.

Were it simply a matter of Taibbi moving on from covering left-coded issues to right-coded ones — however confused such codings are — I would consider the left-wing vitriol Taibbi now receives to be much ado about nothing. It’s his choice to only cover speech issues involving left-wing overreach that’s the problem. Jilani summed up my own thoughts when he wrote, “I read Taibbi even as a teenager. I would think this guy goes after Democrats, he goes after Republicans. He’s the fierce independent journalist we need. He inspired me. Now I’m seeing him get captured by an audience [and] pander to a base.”

Taibbi disputes this characterization, but you can only ask readers not to believe their own lying eyes for so long. I’ve read probably 80 percent of what the man has written over the past decade. Over that span, he went from a legitimately independent-minded journalist who took swings at every side when needed, to someone who now takes aim squarely and virtually exclusively at Democrats and the left. Regardless of whether this represents audience capture or a change in his political views, the shift not just in coverage, but in the way subjects are covered, has been so massive you can practically see it from space. Taibbi’s writing produces the same barbed prose, and his reporting has the same attention to detail and accuracy. But these skills are now bent in the service of straightforwardly partisan ends. The essence of Taibbi’s devolution is perfectly distilled in his unlistenable weekly podcast, America This Week, where he tees up a roster of sometimes obscure but always right-populist-friendly news items for co-host Walter Kirn to take interminably bloviating swings at.

Taibbi’s arc is emblematic of the deeply troubling manner in which speech issues are often discussed more broadly in modern society. Free speech is an enormously important issue, and few endeavors are more valuable than defending it. But you don’t have to be a right-winger to stand up for free speech. You don’t have to vindicate leftist confusion by giving speech advocacy the appearance of a partisan right-wing project. 

The aforementioned FIRE, which expanded in 2022 from a university-speech focused group to a broader free speech organization after the ACLU went AWOL on civil liberties, is perhaps the model example of how to advocate for free expression. Their support for the First Amendment is as robust and impeccable as it is possible to be, and they do so without pandering to right-wing audiences. FIRE covers incidents of left-wing censoriousness as well as those on the right. Even little ol’ me can manage to write about free speech without being partisan. I’ve criticized left-wing speech problems such as youth attitudes toward speech, stealth editing literary classics, and criminalizing hate speech. I’ve also criticized right-wing speech problems such as banning critical race theory, removing an Anne Frank graphic novel from libraries, and Florida legislation that effectively outlaws Pride parades. Hell, I’ve even defended the speech rights of anti-Semites. Because free speech is under attack from every direction, covering it without looking like a stooge is not exactly rocket science.

As a writer and editor with politically moderate, small-l liberal views, I find writing and publishing criticisms of all sides to be the most natural thing in the world. To my way of thinking, the idea of exclusively focusing on the problems with one side would be untenable unless I really did become a partisan hack. There are simply too many things on the left and the right I find contemptible for me to keep my mouth shut about either. If I’d spent the last four or five years solely investigating the wrongdoings associated with the political left or the Democratic Party while staying silent about the other side of the aisle, I would expect to be seen as a right-wing partisan, even if I wasn’t one. To expect otherwise would be to pretend that human nature doesn’t exist.

In a 2021 profile of Matt Taibbi in New York Magazine, Ross Barkan writes that Taibbi sees his work as being inspired by H.L. Mencken, the deliciously acerbic early 20th-century writer and critic (and another influence on me). As he told Barkan, “Especially in an atmosphere where people feel constrained and afraid to say certain things, I think there’s a role for someone to try to do what Mencken did, which was basically undress everyone and skewer sacred cows.” If only Taibbi and his many right-pandering fellow travelers were more Menckenian in their approach. In reality, they aren’t “undressing everyone” — they’re choosing sides and thereby inadvertently undressing themselves.

It should go without saying that people can cover whatever they want in whatever way they want. I wouldn’t be much of a free speech advocate if I didn’t believe that. But selective speech advocacy is not true speech advocacy. Pouring gasoline on the partisan bonfire upon which free speech is being roasted might be an effective way to line your pockets, but it’s a horrible strategy to actually protect speech rights.

Both the left and the right have revealed themselves to be cynical and unprincipled opportunists who champion free speech when they are in the cultural or institutional minority, and jettison it the moment the levers of power are safely in hand. Free speech was never a left or a right issue, regardless of which side happens to fraudulently claim its mantle at any given snapshot in time. If we want to protect our own freedoms, we must protect the freedoms of others. Thomas Paine knew this in 1795. When rights become selective, or partisan, they cease to be rights. There’s nothing right-wing about free speech, but if we lend credence to that misconception by only covering left-wing problems, we accelerate this pernicious trend. It’s up to those of us who oppose censorship and defend free speech to do so in a way that doesn’t empower the very censors we strive against.

See also: “Reverse Psychology Is an Untapped Political Gold Mine”

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