The Turncoats

Why do Left-ish journalists and influencers - Matt Taibbi, Russell Brand, Glenn Greenwald, Joe Rogan, RFK - end up supporting, tacitly or explicitly, the Trump-ian Right?

Today let’s explore the underlying conditions which have caused popular Left-leaning journalists and influencers to swerve, over the last years, into either full-out, no-holds-barred supporters of Trump and the Right, or more tacit fellow travelers. The roster includes cynical “hippie catcher” Russell Brand who recently embraced both Trump and the Bible; Naomi Wolf, former progressive Feminist turned Steve Bannon acolyte. Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald relentlessly attack the Democratic establishment while blithely ignoring the horrible activities of the Right.

Joe Rogan, a former “Bernie Bro,” slants libertarian/Trump/Right, as this episode of “Decoding the Gurus” dissects. RFK Jr fits into this constellation, as a former Democrat and environmental crusader who now supports Trump, even though Trump plans to “drill, baby, drill” while annihilating what’s left of our social services and environmental protections. RFK has taken the former New Age idealist Charles Eisenstein on this twisted journey into Trumplandia with him. In his latest essay, Eisenstein refuses to take any position against a demagogue who vows to put his political enemies into prison, intends to reduce taxes on the wealthy while raising them for the poor, and revels in the prospect of ending Democracy. Faced with this, Eisenstein chooses the “high road”:

I won’t play the game of denouncing or endorsing. The psycho-social patterning of “which side are you on” springs from one of the chief narratives of the mythology of Separation. It understands the world by simplifying it into a drama of good versus evil, and also simplifies the human beings who play roles in that drama into subhuman or superhuman caricatures.

Elon Musk has moved further and further to the Right, manipulating Twitter, once the Internet’s “public square,” to suit his racist, neo-Fascist agenda.

How did this happen? There is nuance and history here¹. Let’s dive into it.

First, let’s admit there is hardly a meaningful Left in American politics. As I discussed in my podcast interview with Jared Paul Sexton, the reason for this is simple: When the Left started to gain traction in the US (after being demonized in the McCarthy Era) in the 1960s and early 1970s, the government and the FBI fought back against it, using a host of dirty tricks.

These dirty tricks included assassinations (Fred Hampton, Malcolm X, JFK, and so on) and the killing of peaceful protestors (Kent State). Another dirty trick was orchestrating trumped-up legal charges against movement leaders such as Abbie Hoffman and Timothy Leary. Long legal battles consumed the energy and financial resources of the Left. The “War on Drugs” was another method. We now know the CIA helped to distribute a range of illegal drugs (cocaine, heroin, and LSD) to intensify social fragmentation while supporting unpopular wars in South East Asia and Latin America. Many believe that the CIA intentionally distributed LSD to the hippie counterculture in the late 1960s, knowing it would accelerate the collapse of “the Movement.”

As demagogues know, rhetoric shapes and controls reality to a great extent. Since the annihilation of an actual Left, mainstream pundits talk about mainstream progressives and Democrats as, somehow, “the Left.” Trump goes so far as to call Kamala Harris a Communist. Obviously, this is absurd. The late David Graeber explained this dynamic well:

Today, Graeber noted, the “Left” is said to be represented by “Obama and Macron-style centrism” which supports entrenched bureaucracies and exploitative corporate practices while protecting Wall Street. “The only possible appeal of that kind of politics is, ‘Well at least they're not Nazis,’” Graeber quips. The Left is reduced to an “extreme center,” dedicated to bureaucratic markets, technocratic controls, and the surveillance-oriented “nanny state.” Graeber said:

Obama … looked like the kind of guy who would have a vision. He acted like a visionary. He had the intonation. He had the way of standing and looking into the distance like he really believed in something. And it shows you something about just how much visionary politics has been killed: It didn't even seem to occur to people to ask what his vision actually was, because it turns out insofar as he had a vision his vision was not to have a vision. He believed in pragmatism, compromise, and so forth.

That's what the center has been reduced to: It's become this pure set of performative symbols. At the same time, you get to feel morally superior, which is ultimately what liberal centrism is all about: It's the ability to feel better than other people.

So there is a symbiosis whereby the right wing pretend to be stupid. George Bush II perfected this: “I'll act like a yokel. All of the liberals will make fun of me as an idiot.” Everybody who resents the cultural elite for having monopolized all the good jobs will look at them sneering at me and say: “Yeah, I bet those guys feel the same way about me as they feel about Bush. I'll vote for Bush — hahaha — stick it to them.” You know that shtick. Trump is just doing it more extreme version of the same thing… you act like an idiot so the educated [liberal] elite make fun of you.

People keep falling for the same stupid trick over and over and over again. There’s a symbiotic relationship between these centrists, who are sneering elitists, and these guys who are the scam artists, who pretend to be yokels, who pretend to be idiots, or pretend to be fascists. They're not even real fascists. They're kind of phony fascists. They are trying to set up a situation where those are the only two viable political choices, because they both feed off and complement one another.

To understand turncoats such as Greenwald, Brand, Taibbi, Naomi Wolf, and so on, we should acknowledge the historical context: First, any authentic Left — any movement to restrain corporate power and create social equity — was destroyed (and when a Leftist hope reappears, as with Bernie Sanders 2016 campaign, it is quickly snuffed out, yet again, with various shifty moves). Then the corporate Democrats (Clinton, Obama, Biden etcetera) appropriate Leftist rhetoric as part of their stage-managed dialectic with Republicans, while both sides maintain the status quo of massive wealth inequality and corporate predation.

A negative perspective sees the opposition between the two parties as a symbiotic relationship which serves both sides (and their financial backers), while stifling any effort at real systemic change. For instance, the Democrats could have fought back against the hijacking of the Supreme Court by expanding the number of Justices; they did not even explore this possibility. It benefits the Democrats to frighten the populace with the ever-present horror of a Republican victory — in fact, considering their tepid platform, it is the only way for them to win. If the Democrats fully supported Leftist policies like decent universal healthcare and progressive taxation, they would win the popular vote in a landslide while alienating their financial backers.

Personally, my perspective is not so extreme: I believe there are meaningful differences between the parties that profoundly impact millions of people. Rob Breszny offers this list of Biden’s progressive accomplishments, and you can read Kamala Harris’s actual policy proposals here. On the other hand, as I have noted previously, the Democrats have done little to restrain oil and gas exploitation, with the US now at its peak of domestic production, which is disastrous for our future. A roster of 88 current and former corporate CEOS have just released a letter supporting Harris’ candidacy. Dick Cheney — Right Wing warmonger, architect of the catastrophic Iraq War that left one million Iraqis dead — is a supporter of Harris.

If you have a Leftist agenda and you report on this situation long enough, you might start to despise the liberal establishment. You might start to hate the hypocrisy of the Democrats more than you hate the malevolence of the neo-Fascistic Right. I sometimes feel close to that, myself.

This is what happened to Greenwald and Taibbi.

A commonly held belief is that the Democrats possess a globalist agenda — aligned with Karl Schwab and the technocratic World Economic Forum — that is worse than the overt racism and covert Fascism of Trump and the Republicans. Taibbi, for instance, writes: “The Democrats’ ambitions are significantly more dangerous than those of the Republicans. From digital surveillance to censorship to making Intel and enforcement agencies central players in domestic governance — all plans being executed globally as well as in our one country — they are thinking on a much bigger and more dangerous scale than Republicans.” While I also do not like the push toward technocratic controls, I believe the Right Wing pose a far greater threat to our immediate future. I think it is naive to believe that the Right, once installed into power, won’t use the same technologies to their advantage, particularly as Peter Thiel, Musk, and many other super-wealthy tech entrepreneurs and investors avidly support them.

Some other crucial factors must be included in this complex equation. One is the pernicious influence of Putin’s Russia and the KGB, which employs a host of strategies to drive deeper rifts within American society, seeking to destroy its hegemonic power. Last week, in fact, a trove of documents were released providing evidence that Russia has financially supported influencers and YouTube streamers such as Dave Rubin and Tim Pool, paying them as much as $400,000 a month through a shell company, Tenet Media. In a livestream last month, Pool declared:

“Ukraine is the enemy of this country! Ukraine is our enemy, being funded by the Democrats. I will stress again, one of the greatest enemies of our nation right now is Ukraine.”

What’s clear is that there is a massive amount of money available for Right Wing influencers, while actual Leftist media is completely under-funded (as I know from personal experience, having tried repeatedly to raise capital for Leftist media projects).

Julian Assange was another beneficiary of Russian largess, apparently considered an asset by the KGB. The Economist noted in 2019:

WikiLeaks’ willingness to serve as an uncritical and enthusiastic laundromat for Russian intelligence reflects the group’s longer history of publishing material with little or no newsworthiness, but calculated to undermine American interests. A cache of CIA hacking tools published in 2017 was one example. In contrast, WikiLeaks almost never publishes leaks that might undermine America’s autocratic rivals. Mr Assange may not be an enemy agent, but he has at least been a useful idiot.

Wikileaks carefully timed release of Hilary Clinton’s emails may have tilted the 2016 election to Trump. As director of the CIA, Mike Pompeo defined Wikileaks in 2017 as “a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia.” In the past, I was impressed with Assange and Wikileaks. As more information comes to light, I no longer see Assange as a heroic figure, but a double agent, on the wrong side in the ongoing war between autocratic and (imperfect) open societies.

Another factor is the rise of cancel culture, #metoo, and woke identity politics, which poses a deep threat to some of these figures, particularly Brand and Taibbi. Their vulnerability to cancellation from the progressive world pushes them further toward the embrace of the Right. The Right not only provides funding and support for them through platforms like Rumble. It also ignores their past mistakes and absolves them of any transgressions.

Let’s look into this more deeply next time.

1. If you want a deep dive into this question from a Leftist perspective, this article from In These Times is worth a read.