Turncoat Taibbi

That’s what I’m calling hack journo Matt Taibbi after his disgraceful embrace of far-right tropes regarding the Hunter Biden laptop. Exploiting the travails of the President’s son is beyond contemptible. Yes, there was a time when Hunter Biden dabbled in drug use (and paid the price for doing so); multiple pics exist of him engaged in questionable practices with sex workers, ingesting proscribed substances, exhibiting obvious signs of mental confusion. Why a once-respected and extant Rolling Stone editor would trash his own career by shifting salacious material about Biden while spreading 2020 election misinformation at the behest of the nefarious Elon Musk, though, is inexplicable. His name is now slime mold in my mouth

The recent, so-called #Twitterfiles drop was a meaningless gesture intended to divert the attention of Musk’s uncritical fan boy legions after his decision to punt Ye from the platform for liking Hitler. That much is clear. Airing private communication between Twitter executives and high-level FBI agents, however, I find an unconscionable and potentially illegal act. We already know the laptop is genuine. A scrupulous New York Times investigation confirmed it. That intelligence officials promoted the idea the laptop’s suspicious appearance at the latter end of the 2020 election campaign suggested a Russian disinformation thrust is irrelevant now. What difference, at this point, does it make? Congress should plot against him.

Did suppressing the reveal Hunter slid 10% of his successful influence peddling pelf to the Big Guy (allegedly Joe Biden) shield the candidate from serious media scrutiny? What of it if it kept Trump out of the White House? I’m with podcaster and Jewish-American savant Sam Harris. Hunter could have had a basement full of raped and murdered children and that would still justify preventing details of his Ukraine business dealings from becoming public knowledge. There was simply too much at stake to risk the uninformed from being swayed, the election’s outcome put in doubt after so much work had gone into fortifying it against Trump and his MAGA minions.

Likewise intimating, as Taibbi’s treacherous tweet thread does, that the Biden campaign targeted various Twitter accounts, ensuring they were then “handled” by Twitter executives, said far-right accounts banished from the site, their voices properly silenced, is the perfection of Monday morning quarterbacking. Of course it looks a dubious matter now, but how soon we forget, a mere two years after, the tsunami of misinformation then flooding social media. People were agitating against mask and vaccine mandates, objecting to needed lockdowns, openly questioning the official science establishment viewpoint, and otherwise threatening democracy. Bad faith actors on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube needed containment. Far-right white nationalist content creators like Steven Crowder and Alex Jones couldn’t be allowed to spout their baseless conspiracy theories about mail-in voting irregularities or illusory Democratic Party ballot harvesting. Biden campaign operatives were merely acting to defend the electoral process, the freest and fairest election ever the result. They should be praised, not vilified as interferers. Taibbi is a criminal madman.

Hearts go out to the family of Tik Tok influencer Megha Thakur, who died suddenly while sleeping in her Brampton, Ontario, Canada, home. The popular 21-year old had suffered a heart attack earlier this year, so medical experts suspect the young woman’s pump just stopped beating due to the stress of her social media success. No other reason for the otherwise healthy extrovert’s demise has been offered (although vile social media malcontents were quick to remind everyone Megha was vaccinated to the gills, as if there was any connection between taking a safe and effective anti-COVID! treatment and her swift, unexpected expiry, misinformation-peddling bastards).

Megha earned her enormous fan base by talking ceaselessly about the perils of growing up a POC in a primarily far-right cis-white heteronormative culture. One million loyal followers reveled in her daily struggle to escape race censure even as they gloried in her gorgeous body. The computer science student will be mourned, her vivacity and warmth soon to be a distant memory. Who will help her fans with low or zero confidence now that she’s swamped with embalming fluid? Who will step up and fill that yawning chasm of teen female self-loathing now that Megha has traipsed on to a higher plane of existence. We many never know the real reason for her death, but it’s enough that she shone so brightly while still above ground breathing air.

That’s today’s diary, guys.

Forever yours,

Tristan K. Pugwash