In college journalism classes throughout the country, Taibbi was a rare hero, Bob Woodward shed of pomposity. In the 2000s, during the height of the financial crisis, he was lauded for his incisive, bilious takedowns of Wall Street - particularly Goldman Sachs as the infamous “ vampire squid.” He won a National Magazine award and regularly appeared on cable television, grinning like an impish schoolboy even as his hair receded. Taibbi is - or was, depending on your view - one of the most celebrated investigative journalists of his generation. Taibbi is viewed in more liberal quarters with increasing suspicion bordering on outright disdain, a remarkable development for a magazine star once considered Rolling Stone’s successor to Hunter S. Few journalists, in polarized 2021, divide the New York-D.C.

If you follow the media and the internecine warfare that’s liable to consume any given afternoon on Twitter, you probably have an opinion about Matt Taibbi. “I feel pretty strongly that the only thing that’s changed is that the New York media world once agreed with the things I was saying, and now they don’t.” I’ve been very consistent over the years in saying the same things,” Taibbi said. “I’m certainly not going to feel guilty for having success at Substack for saying things I believe are true. Not that Taibbi is apologizing for his combative posture.

The public self is not a lie or a performance - it’s just, in private, Taibbi is not going to punch you in the face, like his prose might suggest he would. That could be, if you’ve read Taibbi over the last quarter-century, loaded with possibility: the acidic brilliance or the antic humor or, more recently, the savage scorn he has shown for “cancel culture.” There is a public Taibbi and a private Taibbi, and the more you speak with him and others who know him, the more you begin to understand the difference. “One thing that’s a little irksome, again, in my actual personal life, I could not be more the opposite of that …” The day before, they went on a whale watch. Obviously, I’m anxious about why I’m being profiled,” Matt Taibbi said at the end of our phone call this summer, which had already lasted an hour and a half.

The divide taibbi