Radio War Nerd EP #357 — Out Of Russia & Into The Twittergarchy, with Yasha Levine

I was a *little* concerned when the Twittergate shit came up in the feed, but you guys did a great job of breaking down through the BS, particularly Matt's hackery. As someone who found you guys long after The Exile days, I always love those Russia stories!

Matt Taibbi is now pooping up on Joe Rogan to call out Stephen Colbert for being "woke" What a beige bore he's become

I’d love to see a segment by you guys on the ‘Twitter Files’ when all of them are posted. Both regarding the content of it and the way it’s used by one faction of the ruling class to feud with the other.

I love Mark but I also love Matt. Breaking Points did a very good interview with Matt today about the Twitter saga. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gExHIgWqDSo

Ah, great. Another petty score settling episode.

...love Yasha AND the Nerd and co. Both provide views and contexts you're just not going to get anywhere else, and together...hope you guys have him back sooner rather than later...

Is there a tl;dr on The Exile drama that I can catch up on? I've got the gist from a couple hundred episodes, but this was a tad challenging to follow at times.

When I hear Mark feuding with Matt I think Lennon/McCartney or Waters/Gilmour. There is something about geniuses breaking up

Izabella Kaminska: It was obvious, everyone suspected it, but we didn't have any proof ... and for years that was the reason why you couldn't write anything compelling about it because it was "Where's your proof?" ... well here's the proof, but now it's like "oh, well, uh, it was obvious ..." I agree with Izzy. She is damn smart and she hits the nail on the head. I say this as someone who deeply respects Mark and pays for his content.

Please make this public!!! 🙏

I liked the episode, got kinda catty at the end, but thats what happens when you start talking shop. Gossip.

The Russians have been flipping tables over Angela Merkel's interview with Die Zeit apparently, and I think their casus belli hinges really heavily on the events of 2014. Maybe she and Poroshenko thought a Russian invasion was inevitable but I don't really think so. Russia's invasion was a bad move on their part but NATO did them absolutely no favors; there were a couple of events in 2021 that, had NATO actually been mature adults about them, would have led to a vastly different 2022, in my opinion.

Worst episode ever

Yasha's book "Surveillance Valley" is excellent BTW. Tons of facts but still very readable and enjoyable.

I gave up on Taibbi when he joined Greenwald et al. Much prefer RWN (et al). :)

German greens returning to 1930s glory days of German environmentalism when radical animal cruelty laws were first promulgated there

This was a great episode.

Enjoyed hearing the jealousy and gossip but very discouraged that hosts and guest still think the vaccines and masking have any positive effect. Despite all evidence to the contrary it’s more important apparently to signal membership in the self styled progressive faction than look at the reality of our world.

The start of this episode was good but the rest was not useful or informative. Very little foreign policy discussion or talk of Twitter's impact on policy. This conversation wasn't worthy of posting here especially at two hours.

The old adage — "Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.” What I heard in this episode is 80% of time discussing Matt’s character and personality (plus a little bit of Elon’s), 10% of Yasha sharing his superficial observation of not seeing Zs in Leningrad and sharing rumors he heard there, and another 10% of some ideas about oligarchy, left-right, etc. I have not read “Going Postal”. I assume it’s great. “Surveillance Valley” was very good. In 2018 I donated to Yasha’s “Pistachio Wars” documentary. Still waiting for it to be completed. I could try to psychoanalyze Yasha (and I had some interactions with him), but I won’t. In the meantime, Matt wrote a least half a dozen of great books. His reporting on the financial crisis for the Rolling Stone (eventually “Griftopia”) was head and shoulders above everybody else. Matt was one of the very few respected voices opposing RussiaGate. His recent reporting on FBI’s abuses as part of the J6 campaign exposed what nobody else wants to talk about. What is worth discussing, his work or his personality? You may despise Matt on a personal level and be against his deal with the devil Elon. But it’s worth acknowledging that he was consistent from the start — the suppression of the laptop story was the bigger scandal than the laptop itself. It was a reverse October Surprise orchestrated by the security state. Yes, many of us knew that, but the majority on the “left” to this day believe it was a Russian disinformation (just had a conversation with a otherwise intelligent coworker the other day). Twitter Files, as banal as they are for people who were already aware of the shenanigans, are important to make the record straight. Much more than what Matt wrote or said about Mark 20 years ago. As an aside, I was surprised to learn that Larry Johnson of all people was asked to help with personal safety of the repair shop owner - (https://sonar21.com/american-injustice-my-battle-to-expose-the-truth-by-john-paul-mac-isaac/). There was an interesting tidbit there about the FBI agent giving him a thinly veiled threat. The fun part was that they also used him for technical support. The whole discussion of “left” vs “right” is nauseating. The U.S. “left” would be classified as far right in most other countries. The cultural wars between “left” and “right”, while entertaining and energizing for the masses, don’t matter in the end, and are a distraction from the mechanics of the Empire. Invite, for example, Aaron Good to discuss ideas instead of people. His “American Exception”, in my opinion, has a good chance to achieve a seminal status.

Musk's takeover of Twitter should be linked to deeper factors such as Musk being part of a conservative SV oligarchy ... they are buddies, Tim Cook, Google founders, Oracle's Larry Ellison... They need Twitter for something more than Musk's inflated ego. Taibbi's Twitter thread with Bari Weiss has been used for a Victimization complex among the right-wing. Nothing about the leftwing shadowbans on Twitter. The SV oligarchy has one more tool and they will back Musk financially to sustain Twitter

Good stuff about the progression of Taibbi's career. As always, the sociological aspects are most interesting, never described better than here.

Great episode, always like to listen to Yasha! Found out about my 2nd favourite podcast (Filmsuck) because his lovely wife had an episode about "The Great" (while she was still there).

Glad to hear Mark finally unload on Taibbi. Mark chose integrity while Matt always was heading to where he is today. Ames's comment that class is important to any analysis of American culture is spot on. Of course, the bourgeois journos don't want to hear about that topic, because it makes them feel uncomfortable.

Oh and I forgot to say: WE NEED MORE YASHA! I love it when he pops in on the show.

Was not expecting for this to be so illuminating, just perfect for this moment

Damn you fellas really spilled the tea this episode 💅

I can't see Matt ever speaking at anything resembling a right wing rally, but the rest of it does seem to fill in some gaps for me on what's happen(ing/ed) to Taibbi. Basically the dude got rich and loves it.

Damn! Mark really went in on Matt Taibbi. I never heard him go this far and it’s long overdo. Katie Halper was the last thing holding him to the left and my first intro to him. I stop listening to Useful Idiots because he gave me that racist paranoia sense I get around certain whites and I’m glad to know my instincts weren’t off.

Just joined on the basis of Yasha's recommendation and my own frustration with Taibbi's new direction. I don't share the complete pessimism of the ENTIRE cryptocurrency world, but I do know that there will always be scams that arise in any ecosystem, especially one involved in finance. Anyway, at the same time I subbed here, I unsubbed at Taibbi, so cheers. "The oligarchy's dopamine rollercoaster" would be a great band name in this meta era.

I wonder how many were like me and grew up deep in Conservatism (family subscribed to American Spectator when it was a tabloid) made the switch to the left through Greenwaldian contrarianism?

Great interview! Love hearing Yasha talk about Russia.

Mark Ames is wrong about the German Greens, at least on nuclear- they are and remain militantly anti-nuclear even as the rest of the German political spectrum looks ready to buckle under pressure. Let's hope they do- Germany's decision to shut off its nuke plants was absurdly damaging to its climate goals. They would be so much further along if only they had kept more of those plants online.

Thanks for another thought-provoking episode. Two thoughts: Heavy drug and alcohol use often lead to trouble, if not outright madness. Friendships are often destroyed. Heavy drug and alcohol use combined with politics was a recipe for disaster in my generation of anti-Vietnam War protesters. Second thing: Is there no hope for building a left-right antiwar coalition? Some people on the right, like Andrew Napolitano and Col. Douglas MacGregor seem to be taking a principled antiwar position.

I never understood why people have "righteous leader" expectations of reporters, opinionists, and others who sell their words. With the end of the USSR, there's no left worth writing for, at least no left with the numbers or the clout... so, "left-affected" larpers can either (1) appeal to the contrarian right on social media or (2) approach on bended knee as hand-wringing liberal whisperers for some NYTimes or Lannan Foundation coin. They aim to be heard, they aim to be paid, maybe they aim to influence the discourse. These are not organizers, at least not people who organize workers or the left. I can't really be disappointed in opinionists, let alone feel betrayed... they're not that important. I just disagree with them.

Great ep. About Taibbi, I always remember the great Alex Cockburn's line on Hitchens: "Then in the 90s he got a bee in his bonnet about Clinton which developed into full-blown obsessive megalomania: the dream that he, Hitchens, would be the one to seize the time and finish off Bill. Why did Bill — a zealous and fairly efficient executive of Empire — bother Hitchens so much? I’m not sure. He used to hint that Clinton had behaved abominably to some woman he, Hitchens, knew. Actually I think he’d got to that moment in life when he was asking himself if he could make a difference. He obviously thought he could, and so he sloshed his way across his own personal Rubicon and tried to topple Clinton via betrayal of his close friendship with Sid Blumenthal, whom he did his best to ruin financially (lawyers’ fees) and get sent to prison for perjury." "Sloshed his way across his own personal Rubicon" is such a great line – and that seems to fit a child of media privilege like Taibbi, he has gotten to the point in his life where he "wants to make a difference", and the left is not serving him in this purpose anymore. And like John and Mark said, the left is terrible with loyalties. It's a pretty nasty place unless there's something genuinely mobilizing going on, like the Bernie campaign, or Syriza here in Europe. And after those failed, the frustrations make people turn on former comrades over petty shit. I don't know if Taibbi is "on the right", I've never seen any right wing attitudes really in the guy. I think he's too educated, psychologically stable, and well off to harbor any such delusions about migrants, cultural elites, homosexuals or the usual targets of misdirected right wing rage. He doesn't seem to like inequality either, I get the genuine sense in him that he doesn't like the inequality of America, even if as Mark says, he seems to like rich and influential people. Again, to quote the great AC, I remember him saying about Victor Nevasky of The Nation "Victor liked to schmooze around with the New York Times elite, and didn't like me sniping at them too viciously". A lot of people are like that. When the cultural cache and all that is on the line, they don't want to be real populists anymore. And is there a better fake populist oligarch than Elon Musk? The two seems made for eachother.

The Sinema news this morning, immediately got me thinking about Taibbi and Greenwald. For some reason, Beto also floated into my mind. The first thing that came to mind was that for many Gen Xers (myself included), collective action and mass politics were a non-starter. Our generation was small and politically insignificant. The means of social advancement was purely individualized. At a younger age, for a lot of us, our moral universe may have been polarized between keeping it real and not selling out. But at a certain point, the incentive structure obliterates those concerns. If you have a chance to sell out, most people will do it. The line of least resistance, and the incentive structure pushes more strongly towards becoming Elon Musk’s press agent, rather than one of Elon Musk’s critics. The problem is that you can’t resolve deep structural issues in the economy this way. In many ways Musk is part of the problem. Part of what has changed for a younger cohort is that they are poorer and more precarious than many of us were at their age, but they are also more numerous. So something like class politics from below and mass politics becomes more feasible. For the younger generation of oligarchs (the ones in their 50s like Musk), this obsession with “wokeness”, I see as fundamentally a complaint about challenges to the existing social and economic hierarchy from below — particular from a group of more precarious young people. If you’re on top or have access to people near the top (as Sinema, Taibbi, Greenwald, and Beto do), you don’t want to sacrifice your position. Any challenge from below is going to be resisted by people with real power. What’s beyond parody is the way that these conservatives transform oligarchs into an oppressed and beseiged class. In a way these oligarchs are beseiged, but it is not because they are being oppressed. The challenge to the existing social and economic hierarchy is happening, because a lot of people are living more precariously, because we have structured our economy around coddling and making people like Elon Musk richer and richer, while everyone else gets poorer.

I didn't want to click on this episode because I'm so sick of hearing about Elon Musk chaos and Taibbi, but I'm glad I did. The whole thing is pretty sad, to be honest.

Great episode. I think Yasha hit the nail on the head when he talked about the financial incentives of Substack. I was an early subscriber to Taibbi's substack and he wrote good stuff shitting on Russiagate and all the #resistance lib dead enders, but that ended up attracting a right-wing audience, plus criticizing Russiagate and his attempted cancellation for the bogus eXile allegations meant a lot of the left wasn't going to read him anymore. I'm sure he was well aware of which pieces of his were generating traffic and which weren't and re-branded accordingly. Getting into bed with Musk is quite shameless, but after he took the book he wrote about Eric Garner out of his Twitter bio so as not to offend all his new subscribers, no one should be surprised.

So damn interesting. Near-principals talking about The Big Story of the moment. This is the ep you need to open to the public and promote the fuck out of immediately. Its value is NOW.

somewhere around the hour mark, I thought about the Donald Sutherland scene in JFK, where he says, "The how and the who is just scenery for the public." Kind of feels like that's what they're getting at, with, "who benefits from the journalism stories these days". Like, everyone is talking about the details of the story (the how and the who). Like, back in the robber baron days, Jay Gould would use newspapers to puff up or tank different stocks. The naive vision of "investigative journalism" has never really been true - even the watergate journalism can be explained as an intelligence operation between internal factions. So, from any mainstream source, it feels like the first question should always be - "Cui bono"? Which is often not considered at all when a story 'breaks'

Great ep- lot of the taibbi talk resonated with my experiences running into young professional people in DC and watching their souls leave their bodies

Excellent as always. What baffles me (and I wish you guys could’ve commented on) is how you square Matt’s supposed comfort with (and desire to be around) the banker and financier types with the fact that so much of his journalistic career has revolved around exposing the various corrupt practices of Wall Street. Obviously, I don’t know the guy (or you guys), and only have a superficial grasp of the backstory with the debacles surrounding your Russia days, but this fact always leads me to be skeptical of assessments that place Taibbi in the hands of “the right,” or the financial elite, or whatever. Mark- the pain in your voice is palpable here, and I can only imagine what it’s like when talking about a person to whom you were clearly close, only to suffer what I can only imagine felt like (for lack of better term) a bad breakup. Your self-restraint at not dumping all over Matt, and even scaling back Yasha at times in this interview to paint a nuanced picture of him is extremely admirable.

fuck yes looking forward to listening to this

Excellent episode👌🏻enjoyed it quite a bit

I was a teenager for the NYP era and it’s embarrassing now to say how influential those columns were because back then my truest ambition was to also be Hunter Thompson and Do Journalism On Drugs. I’m cringing but it’s true.

wow, that comment about being a reformed right winger is true. As a teenager i read and loved and read both of Rush Limbaughs books and nowadays i find them so revolting. Also the inside information behind Matts involvement and attitudes at the Exile and his connections and his desire to be accepted by his wealthy peers. "The Rich are rich together" F. Scott Fitzgerald Loved this episode!!!

Noticed Yasha called it Leningrad. We should all give Putin the finger and revert to the Soviet name. Screw Tsar Peter, he was no "saint"!

Also - is there anywhere to buy the eXile book that’s not Amazon for $400?!

The eXile played a huge role in my intellectual development. My discovery of the eXile (long after it was shuttered) made me critically evaluate everything I had internalized about US policy to Russia - and gave voice to some element of resistance I felt when I heard the likes of McFaul elevated to “expert” status when it comes to Russia. It really blows to see how things turned out, and watching Yasha, Mark and Matt feud really stings.