295 Comments

This a great example of why we subscribe. Wonderful, thorough, actual careful reporting! You are the real deal, Matt, and I wish newsrooms would bring you or at least your articles in to show peop,people, how it's done.

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Our once productive nation has been riddled with cancerous parasites. Parasites & looters go where the money is. Since they have nothing valuable to offer, they scheme & plot all sorts of nefarious ways to get at what they could not earn in a free market. Expect the same band of looters & parasites to eventually flock to Texas and take up residence there, after California has completed its descent into a permanent hellhole.

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I am sharing this as far and wide as I can. I am going to be thinking about it for a while but there is only one thing to say as a quick response:

Remember - the original title of “Atlas Shrugged” was “The Strike”. I think the Peter Thiels and Elon Musks of the world should go on strike because there is a tipping point where the parasites and second handers take over and as another commentator said- they don’t produce anything - they only feed off the makers and the doers. We need to wise up.

I say the same thing about Rand as I do about Orwell- they were not prophets. They were merely brilliant at fictionalizing what already was and had been. Nothing new under the sun.

Why do we always let it go too far?

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Gee; most people in jail are Men; should we strive for equal female "can I say that?" representation? Black Men are overrepresented in basketball "because they're better at it"; should we strive for more white players? Asians are overrepresented in STEM, should, scratch that. Have you seen any trans Men competing in high end sports, obviously we must have more. We keep trying to prove thing's that just aren't so because politically they should be so, so we use the legal sledgehammer to pretend that Men and Women are the same; they're not. We complement each other. I lived through the good ol days when the fight was against discrimination and it was mostly won and rightly so. Now the the fight is "for" discrimination to reimagine society and the SJ warrior industrial complex is big bucks doing big obstruction. Other than Tesla that I'd like to see unionized, all the other corporations are virtual, producing nothing and that's a microcosm of the country, producing nothing.

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I can't wait for the sympathetic profile of Wipper in one of the legacy media outlets, wherein she suffered online harassment because big, bad Matt Taibbi said mean things about her, and that she is therefore the Real Victim (TM) in all of this.

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May 14, 2022·edited May 14, 2022

No one covers gargantuan political train wrecks like Taibbi does. Looking forward to part 3. Well, somewhat. I have a feeling the details are going to get even more outrageously stupid.

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I saw Butt Plugs and Lubricant at Coachella in 1993.

CA is a shithole. It just is. Socialism made what is undoubtedly one of the most geographically blessed locations in the world into a suffocating miasma of crazy Left wing ideals. It's just sad. I'd close the Fremont plant. Musk has his proof of concept. You CAN have an auto manufacturing plant in CA. Doesn't mean you should.

I went to college in CA in the last years of last century. Amazing place. But even then, the specter of totalitarianism seeped everywhere. I wouldn't want to live there ever.

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Thanks for writing this Matt.

I follow a lot in the gaming space, and even in the part of the culture that pushes back against the excesses of games journalists there is blanket condemnation of Activision, it's CEO Bobby Kotick in specific. Pointing to this litigation is a big part of it.

The allegations vs the proclamations of culpability and the way it gets characterized is a pretzel knot of logic.

I've been getting my oppositional fix recently in following a flow of legal cases where the media has said one thing very loudly, and the details coming out in court are very different. True justice boner inducing stuff.

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I am so pleased I decided to follow Matt. There are so few investigative journalists left. Who else would you recommend?

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When the government gets THAT corrupt, the mafia becomes an honest (and reliable) broker. Do Wipper and Herold really want to live in that world - not that they would for long.

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Matt, this is better than a spy novel. Your writing is spectacular and the subject, which I expected to be dry but important, comes to life. I cannot wait for the next installment of the continuing saga of how worthless virtually ALL government is -- and surely most regulators.

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May 15, 2022·edited May 15, 2022

I am a former government litigator and hearing officer. I have first-hand experience with many of the issues described in this series. I've worked with lawyers like the ones described: they litigate in bad faith and use the legal system to extort settlements from defendants or pursue large judgments. It is a disgrace.

Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick used a similar technique when he was the Acting US Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. His department would file a civil action against a company and coerce the defendant to settle or else face criminal charges. I was working as an Assistant Prosecuting Attorney in an Ohio county at the time. I asked my boss, Prosecuting Attorney, about this. He misunderstood my question and thought that I was thinking about doing something like that. He yelled at me that if he ever found out I was doing that he would have me charged with extortion. Good to know.

These actions are the same. The government attorneys announce (or leak) information to the press in order to create a negative atmosphere in order to force the defendants to settle. Glenn Greenwald has been writing about this abuse over at his Substack page regarding how the press has been going after Rep. Matt Gaetz and former Missouri Governor Eric Greitens.

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Multiply this by a billion and spread it throughout our society and you have a snapshot of modern America. A dysfunctional hellhole. I must live in a very protected world but the only time I hear the “n- word”(which is extremely racist that some races can flagrantly use this word while others can’t) is when: listening to Dave Chappelle, rap, or black people interacting. I’m calling the bullshit card on almost all this crap. Here’s what is true: affirmative action is racism, Asians are discriminated against by Harvard, women have higher rates of college graduation and advanced degrees, women have a longer life expectancy, etc.

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Matthew, you are spoiling us.

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there seems a problem in this line: "Tesla, the clean energy carmaker run by would-be Twitter conqueror Elon Musk, is also inveigled in a shockingly bloody war with the Golden State." inveigle means to attempt to persuade by flattery or deception; the word here seems more likely to be involved.

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Matt - these are hard times, and my wife and I track our expenses carefully. That being said, the $50 we paid for a yearly sub to your articles was money well spent! Your articles, like this one, are always thoughtful, carefully written, insightful.

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