Remember when Matt Taibbi Bullied 9/11 Truthers?
I came out as a truther in 2015 with my 9/11 novel, Locus Amoenus. It wasn’t an easy decision. I anticipated being called "clinically insane," a “dickwad,” promoting “rank steaming bullshit” by the likes of Matt Taibbi.
Among other notable left-leaning 9/11 truth debunkers, such as Chris Hayes and Noam Chomsky, Taibbi stands out in my memory as being particular angry, nasty, and very sure of himself.
As Tiabbi writes in Rollingstone in September 2006,
9/11 Truth followers will doubtless argue that I am ignoring the mountains of scientific evidence proving that the Towers could not have collapsed as a result of the plane crashes alone… To which I'll have to answer: you're right. I am ignoring it. You idiots. Even if it were not the rank steaming bullshit my few scientist friends assure me that it is, none of that stuff would prove anything.
Despite his fairly recent road-to-Damascus conversion, finally realizing that “left” journalism has lost its way — and now supports the US Empire, the surveillance state and the censorship industrial complex — Tiabbi hasn’t, insofar as I know, reflected much upon the deeds of his earlier self, when he was a rabid attacker of those who would report a few facts about how gravity works.
I want to point out that, in Taibbi’s infamous above-mention 2006 article, “The Idiocy Behind the '9/11 Truth' Movement,” his main “gripe” is that truthers aren’t conspiracy theorists: he complains that, for the most part, they just analyze the physical evidence pointing to the use of incendiaries, and they do not offer, a “concrete theory of what happened, who ordered what and when they ordered it, and why,” which, of course, the engineers examining the physical evidence could not do, no more than the coroner who does the autopsy in a murder case could do.
As late as July 2019, Taibbi was still bashing 9/11 “conspiracy theorists” by associating the movement’s investigators, who had Engineering or Physics PhDs, with “Flat Earthers” and “Moon Landing Deniers” (yawn).
But within a year’s time, after he got locked down during CoVid, he started noting how the media censored commonsense notions about how best to deal with infectious disease. This time, he started questioning the official narrative. Not long thereafter, this foul-mouthed enfant terrible of journalism, this wannabe Hunter S. Thompson, became the target of his own kind of snark from his former colleagues.
No longer with Rollingstone, by September 11, 2021, Taibbi was making the connections between the “War on Terror” and the “War on CoVid.” Two years later, he repeated such observations again on Racket News.
Now, it seems to be clear to Taibbi why 9/11 happened.
Although Taibbi is doing useful work these days exposing how government and Big Tech colluded to censor US citizens, he could say a thing or two about that other kind of censorship — the most powerful kind: name-calling, dismissiveness, bullying. No one wants to be ridiculed in public. No one wants to be put in that hated group, the Truther, the Anti-Vaxxer, the Anti-Semite, the TransPhobe.
Taibbi was very effective at getting people to stay silent about an important historical event. I can’t help but speculate that, had more people been made aware of the 9/11 cover up, more people would have been cynical about government authority and fewer people might have taken the shot.
When is Taibbi going to admit that the 9/11 truthers were right? It’s not too late for an apology.
"Are we ALL to be held to the flame for every mistake we ever made? No one here has ever changed their minds, their beliefs on a subject?" I'm sorry, Susan, but you are missing the point here. No one is accusing Taibbi of having changed his mind about the facts apropos 9/11. As you say, people revise their opinions all the time, and it is the people who refuse to revise them when they learn new facts who alone deserve censure. The accusation against Taibbi is, however, not that he changed his mind and then came to better conclusion -- IF indeed he ever did -- but that he made no RATIONAL ARGUMENT, utilizing STRONG FACTUAL EVIDENCE and SOUND LOGICAL INFERENCES to attack what he, already at the start of the piece, illegitimately derides as 1.] the "CONSPIRACY THEORISTS"-- a self-serving term invented by CIA gaslighters by the way -- who merely hold a different opinion on the matter. Thus, among many other things, Taibbi is also being accused by many of his critics both here and elsewhere, of 2.] supplanting any rational argument for his position with nothing but scurrilous, primarily "AD HOMINEM," attacks, not on the opinions of those he lambasts, but upon them personally. And indeed the invective which he pours upon them can only be considered well "över-the-top"! He begins not by championing free speech and reasoned argument, but by proudly "ignoring" any possible opinion contrary to his own position, i.e. a position, by the way, totally COMPLICIT with governmental fabrications designed to gaslight and hence shut up the public through endless bullying and intimidation, just as he himself seeks to shut up his much smaller audience of his opponents here. 3.] The technical name for such a mistaken discourse ploy in the Western rhetorical tradition is "ARGUMENTUM AD IGNORANTUM" or "argument from ignorance." 4.] He continues by calling everyone who accepts any other view of 9/11"ïdiots," and instead appealing to "[his] few scientist friends" [evidently VERY few at that!] who inform him that such heterodoxy against the Establishment truth of the BIG PEOPLE WHO KNOW WHAT'S BEST FOR US LITTLE PEOPLE is naught but "rank steaming bullshit" and that "none of that stuff [i.e. evidently no solid evidence and rational argument whatsoever] would prove anything," which, I suppose, it wouldn't to a self-maimed purblind dogmatist like Taibbi, but that hardly acquits him of the charge of having utilized here a typical version of the 5.] AD VERECUNDIAM fallacy, i.e. the appeal to the opinion of some false authorities, "his scientist friends," in lieu of providing evidence. He then proceeds to claim that his opponents on how the three buildings came down on 9/11 are also to be condemned because; 6.] "they just analyze the physical evidence pointing to the use of incendiaries, and they do not offer, a “concrete theory of what happened, who ordered what and when they ordered it, and why,” as if one could know such further facts without a detailed CRIMINAL investigation, -- which we have still never had! -- seeking to assign particular human responsibility and blame for the attacks rather than merely to establish that the official account of how the THREE WTC buildings came crashing down defies the most basic LAWS OF PHYSICS and must therefore be rejected. This tactic is usually called 7.] "moving the goalposts of truth" or "upping the burden of truth" and indeed IS rejected by all who seek to participate in legitimate argumentation. As V.N. Alexander notes, Taibbi next 8.] "associat[es] [the 9/11 Truth] movement’s investigators, who had Engineering or Physics PhDs, with “Flat Earthers” and “Moon Landing Deniers” (yawn)," which is, of course, simply more particularly distasteful, AD HOMINEM mudslinging. ................ Well there are many other reprehensible compositional and rhetorical flaws in the Taibbi article, but I suspect you get the point by now. In short, the piece is one of the most God-awful pieces of constative prose I have ever had the misfortune to read and analyse. It everywhere displays a mind that remains completely ignorant of the most fundamental pragmatic rules of rational discourse as these have been worked out over literally thousands of years. That such shoddy scribbling should be printed in public journals, or merely taken seriously on an FB page like this one is, to put it charitably, simply DISGRACEFUL!!
Jimmy Dore was denigrating 9/11 Truth Activists until about 2 - 2-1/2 years ago. He finally saw some light after reading the WTC7 report from the University of Alaska Fairbanks… I heard him make one more anti-truth comment after that… but then he finally came out.
I think it’s really hard to beat back cognitive dissonance, years or decades for some people, some or most maybe never…
Taibbi graduated from Bard College, where I did… I’m hoping to see him at a Bard event some day and have a talk with him about this.
I know that knowing 9/11 was a scam helped me see through what was going on. I was seeing some of the same techniques to squash gene therapy dissenters as I saw on truth activists. Physics and architecture are my background, so the C-19 Plandemic was out of my wheelhouse. (Thank you V.N.A. for advising me early on… so glad I didn’t let the fear trick me into getting the poisonous jab)!!
I will say, that I’ve done a lot of reading on biology/medicine/virology/pathology…. While I’m by no means close to the level of an actual doctor. But it’s showed me how doctors have been taught to rely almost exclusively on Big Pharma treatments for everything. It’s also taught me to ask my doctor questions and how to research what questions to ask.
Like Taibbi, I think, is a journalist to make society a better place, I think most doctors are in medicine because they honestly want to help people but they are so indoctrinated into a corrupted system, it’s difficult to see the light through the canopy of corruption.