There is a Libertarian-Trumpian alliance in the “Twitter files” saga

Over the weekend, the journalist and writer Matt Taibbi has made many tweets to talk about a variety of documents and information relating to Twitter and its employees. Or rather: to the previous management of the social network, which has been owned by since 27 October Elon Muskwho personally delivered the materials to Taibbi.

According to Musk, at the center of these “Twitter Files” there would be a political scandal dating back to 2020when the New York Post published a series of accusations against Hunter Biden, the son of the American president. Due to many doubts about the validity of the article, Twitter decided to limit its diffusion, unleashing republican paranoia. Today Taibbi, with Musk’s permission, released a series of internal messages dating back to those days, from which a political conspiracy does not seem to be emerging as much as the internal discussion (and confused) of a company grappling with what Musk so detests: content moderation.

It remains to be understood who Taibbi is and why Musk has entrusted him with the management of the story. Born in 1970, Matt Taibbi was a protégé of US journalism: over the years he has covered the Soviet Union and the financial crisis, recounting the saga of Goldman Sachs (which he nicknamed the “vampire squid”) and winning the prestigious National Magazine Award in 2008 for his articles in Rolling Stone. Because of his style of him, he has repeatedly been referred to as the heir of the father of gonzo journalism, Hunter S. Thompson. At one point, around 2020, his work changed profoundly. In a New York Magazine article titled “What Happened to Matt Taibbi?”, the reporter vowed that he was still the same, but that he had to react to an increasingly hysterical and illiberal world. Having abandoned collaborations with the giants of liberal journalism, Taibbi has opened a paid newsletter on the Substack service: 50 dollars a year, “tens of thousands of paid subscribers”, and a long series of posts against the “mainstream media” in which attacks their anti-Trump or pro-vaccine obsession by explaining that “for today’s directors it is more important to have the right position than to be correct”.

Such zeal in attacking the New York Times or NPR brought him closer to Fox News and its anchorman Tucker Carlson, one of the channel’s most inflammatory and extreme voices. According to Taibbi, in fact, Fox News would not represent a threat, given that “the financial-political elite and all its power is on the other side”. As a result, “I think they’re the ones to worry about.”

Taibbi’s parable closely resembles that of another big name in left-wing journalism, who quickly passed from the Snowden case to Fox News: Glenn Greenwald. It was he who was contacted by the National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, to whom he handed over the files on which the investigation was based. Greenwald has since had a varied career: in 2014 he co-founded the site The Intercept (which Taibbi also worked on), only to leave it in 2020 crying out for censure from his own editors and taking refuge on Substack, like his former colleague . Here he focuses on themes dear to Trumpism and a certain libertarian right, in a drift that has led him to be a regular presence on Fox News, where he takes it out on Big Tech but also on the classic targets of the American right, mixing rhetoric anti-system to some talking points of the republicans.

Just as Musk uses freedom of expression as a weapon for cultural battles, Taibbi and Greenwald do the same with their criticisms – even legitimate ones – of the mainstream media, considered a priori corrupt and liars. In the publication of Twitter Files, however, Taibbi confessed to having accepted “certain conditions” imposed by Musk. Which? We don’t know.