Heros and Friends
By Jim Buckley
Two more names you should acquaint yourself with, seek out, enjoy, and pay attention to are those of Matt Taibbi and Aayan Hirsi Ali.
Mr. Taibbi arrived on the right bank of American politics rather circuitously. He began his career in the Soviet Union, a move he says came about because of his love of Russian writers. He graduated from the small liberal arts Bard College, situated in a small hamlet less than 100 miles from Manhattan at the edge of Dutchess County, New York. I am not familiar with the school, but I can only guess it is another of those myriad academic outposts that feed into the educratic assembly topped by the Ivy League behemoths of Harvard, Yale, and MIT. But, frankly, that’s just a guess.
In any case, Matt later journeyed to Leningrad where he worked as a freelance reporter there and elsewhere in the USSR, including Uzbekistan. He lived in Mongolia for a stretch and even played basketball for a Mongolian Basketball Association team before ending up in Moscow, whereupon he helped launch the bi-weekly eXile an English-language bi-weekly free newspaper comparable to France’s CharlieHebdo, though its focus was on sex, drugs, and crime in the new Russia. The paper was crude and rude, and mocked many things about the new Russia, including its President Vladimir Putin, which no doubt had something to do with the publication’s ultimate demise.
Its relatively long 10-year lifespan (1997 – 2008) surprised everyone, no doubt including Taibbi, though Matt had left the paper in 2002, having found a job writing for Rolling Stone. Of the ten books he’s written, at least four have found themselves on The New York Times best seller list (“The Great Derangement,” “Griftopia,” “The Divide” and “Insane Clown President”). He is now editor of the online magazine, Racket.
Advocate for the First Amendment
Matt was one of the journalists who appeared in front of a Congressional panel during a hearing on what became known as the “Twitter Files.” The other journalists were Michael Shellenberger, Time magazine’s “Hero of the Environment 2020,” best-selling author (“San Fransicko,” “Apocalypse Never”) and now, apparently, a turncoat to the liberal cause, and Bari Weiss, a former opinion writer and editor for The New York Times. She also worked as a book review editor at The Wall Street Journal, among many other writing gigs.
Ms. Weiss has also become a “friend” and we’ll have more about her in upcoming issues.
Matt refers to himself now as “an advocate for the First Amendment.” His exposé about how “Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation ‘requests’ from every corner of government: the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at [the State Department], even the CIA” should be a must read by every participant in every journalism 101 class in America.
In a statement to Congress, Matt noted that: “For every government agency scanning Twitter [prior to Elon Musk’s takeover], there were perhaps 20 quasi-private entities doing the same, including Stanford’s Election Integrity Project, Newsguard, the Global Disinformation Index, and others, many taxpayer funded.”
He called what he learned from the Twitter Files “a form of digital McCarthyism” and confessed that “as someone who grew up a traditional ACLU liberal, this mechanism for punishment without due process is horrifying.”
In closing, he castigated the mainstream press: “Instead of investigating these groups, journalists partnered with them. If Twitter declined to remove an account right away, government agencies and NGOs would call reporters for The New York Times, Washington Post, and other outlets, who in turn would call Twitter demanding to know why action had not been taken. Effectively,” Matt concluded, “news media became an arm of a state-sponsored thought-policing system.”
Fascism, anyone?
A Fearless Former Muslim
Aayan Hirsi Ali was born in Somalia and as a five-year-old underwent what all five-year-old Muslim girls went through then and probably still do – a procedure that can only be called genital mutilation. At the age of 22, she was set to marry someone she had never met in Canada; the wedding had been arranged by her parents. She disappeared somewhere between her flight from Nairobi, Kenya, and Canada, and sought refuge in Holland, where nearly ten years later, she was elected to the Dutch Parliament.
Her life changed dramatically after the film (“Submission”) she and Theo van Gogh had worked on together was released. Mr. van Gogh was shot by a Dutch-born Muslim who’d objected to the anti-Muslim film. The murderer stabbed Mr. van Gogh’s dead (or dying) body in the chest through a note that read, in effect, “Aayan Hirsi Ali is next.”
She was granted an enhanced security guard but was eventually driven out of Holland by neighbors who feared for their own lives in the apartment complex where she lived. Since then, she has written a best-selling autobiography (“Infidel”) and moved to the United States, where she lived and worked as an atheist; she has recently embraced Christianity.
I’ll let her words tell the rest of her story:
Turn to Christianity
“The line often attributed to G.K. Chesterton has turned into a prophecy: ‘When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.’
“In this nihilistic vacuum, the challenge before us becomes civilizational. We can’t withstand China, Russia, and Iran if we can’t explain to our populations why it matters that we do. We can’t fight woke ideology if we can’t defend the civilization that it is determined to destroy. And we can’t counter Islamism with purely secular tools. To win the hearts and minds of Muslims here in the West, we have to offer them something more than videos on TikTok.
“The lesson I learned from my years with the Muslim Brotherhood was the power of a unifying story, embedded in the foundational texts of Islam, to attract, engage, and mobilize the Muslim masses. Unless we offer something as meaningful, I fear the erosion of our civilization will continue. And fortunately, there is no need to look for some New Age concoction of medication and mindfulness.
“Christianity has it all.
“That is why I no longer consider myself a Muslim apostate, but a lapsed atheist. Of course, I still have a great deal to learn about Christianity. I discover a little more at church each Sunday. But I have recognized, in my own long journey through a wilderness of fear and self-doubt, that there is a better way to manage the challenges of existence than either Islam or unbelief had to offer.”
So, with their words still ringing in our heads, we friends of the First Amendment and of common-sense governance, join with open arms Matt Taibbi and Aayan Hirsi Ali to our mutual cause.
Let Freedom Ring!
•••
More friends and heroes next week.
Current renews my faith in humanity.
Speaking truth to power. Their courage leave me breathless; and still too often speechless in my own exercise of the same. Thanks for the introductions.