Matt Taibbi outs the Fake progressives backing guys like Tom Malinowski.
/By Rubashov
Pulitzer Prize winning author Chris Hedges argues that in modern America, war is central to how we define our nation. In a time of cultural schism, war is all that’s left to provide us with collective meaning. It also makes the corporations at the center of our political establishment enormous profits.
For someone interested in running for public office, how they get there, the political path they choose, often comes down to happenstance. Take those so-called “Republicans” the corporate operatives at the Star-Ledger have dredged up to advance the ridiculous claim that the family of former Governor Tom Kean was a sort of sleeper cell – MAGA even before Donald Trump was. It’s as if Tom Moran wanted to be his own “Q” with his own whacky “MAGA under the bed” delusions and conspiracy theories.
We don’t know Rick Wolfe, a “Republican” who has suggested that the career of former State Senator Tom Kean Jr. was one redolent of political extremism, but we know a great many like him. The chances are our Mr. Wolfe didn’t have a political ideology before someone happened along and asked him if he wanted to “be somebody”: “Step right up, get involved and become a local muckety-muck. Oh, and by-the-way, we’re Republicans…”
It might just as well have been Democrats. At that point, our “somebody-in-the-making” either affirms his party allegiance or quietly realigns it in order to pursue his rendezvous with celebrity. His (or her) “politics” (a form of schtick) is fleshed-out later, picked-up while hanging around with whatever crew of party animals he ends up in. And depending on his personality, he can become quite loud about it, the way fans become at a sports bar. But that’s all there is to it.
Tom Malinowski left Communist Poland with his mother, an academic. After she married Blair Clark, he ended up in a wealthy patrician family that was aligned with the Democratic Party. It makes you wonder the party he’d be serving now if mom had married a Todd. Blair Clark was one of those delightfully blue-blooded, old-fashioned liberals, best described in the writing of Gore Vidal. Sadly, they are a rare species today.
Wikipedia is pretty straightforward in its definition of Blair Clark: “An American liberal journalist and political activist who played key roles both as a journalist and a political operator. He was general manager and vice president of CBS News from 1961 to 1964, and later became editor of The Nation magazine. He was Senator Eugene McCarthy's national campaign manager for the 1968 presidential nomination.”
Malinowski was raised in the lap of East Coast Establishment Liberalism, but he didn’t hang around New Jersey long. He had international tastes and so, after studying political science at Berkeley and philosophy at Oxford, the right connections landed him a series of interesting appointments: intern in Senator Bill Bradley's office, special assistant to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a stint at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, research assistant for the Ford Foundation, speechwriter for Secretaries of State Warren Christopher and Madeleine Albright… You get the idea.
Along the way, Malinowski picked-up a case of bad ideology. He went to work for Human Rights Watch, an international organization that does some laudable work but with a decidedly corporate Left edge to it. One of its founders is a chief lieutenant to George Soros. Tom Malinowski became a kind of upper-class Marxist and critic of Israel. He embraced the suburban Marxism of “identity politics” because real Marxism based on economic class is the kind that will take your stuff (and suburban Marxists don’t want to part with their stuff).
At Human Rights Watch, he pushed for confrontation (i.e. war) with “noncompliant” states. Malinowski pushed for a no-fly zone in Syria (that’s where we get to shoot down other nations’ aircraft, which could lead to…) and for refusing peace talks with the Taliban until they embraced Wokeism (in any case, the Taliban won). He also opposed providing Israel with the same munitions that America is happy to provide to Ukraine and lobbied to block Israel’s construction of a West Bank wall.
Tom Malinowski came to believe in “things” – he adopted an ideological perspective – but he was still enough of a careerist politician to make accommodations when seeking appointment to higher public office. In 2014, Malinowski was confirmed as Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor in the Obama administration where he promptly blotted his copybook by ignoring the labor abuses of some Asian nations so that the administration could pursue a trade deal. Later, he would help start a company that tried to bring investment into Myanmar – a country accused of genocide against a religious minority.
Tom Malinowski is a politician who has embraced a fashionable iteration of Leftist ideology best known as “identity-based Marxism” or “Wokeism”. He believes it enough to have consistently advanced it throughout his career in Congress. That said, he is enough of a political careerist to consistently make the necessary accommodations with the Democrat Party leadership – Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s crew – and the corporate establishment they serve.
Like Tom Moran, Tom Malinowski is happy to alter your child’s gender. That’s central to the new “Woke” religion. That’s a fashion-statement. A supposed signal of Tom’s “goodness”. But when it comes to something that really matters – like altering America’s foreign policy away from permanent war and permanent corporate profits from war – Tom Malinowski simply lacks the balls.
Matt Taibbi, one of the best independent journalists writing today, just posted a wonderful article titled, “The Brutal Comedy of the Withdrawn Peace Letter”. It details how 30 Democratic House members grew and un-grew spines in record time, in a slapstick fiasco predicted almost to the last word. Matt writes:
It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes, one wishes something wasn’t quite so funny. The world this week needed a political maneuver pulled off with no laughs, and an influential group of American politicians (with one admirable exception) proved unable to accommodate.
The Congressional Progressive Caucus took about 36 hours to pull off a circular firing squad stunt that would have made the Keystone Kops stand and applaud:
On June 27th, analyst Christopher Mott at The Institute for Peace and Democracy published a white paper called, “Woke Imperium: The Coming Confluence Between Social Justice and Neoconservatism.” You might remember it. It was featured here in a TK article called “The Great Military Rebrand,” and Chris and I did a call-in show about his thesis.
One of Mott’s central ideas was that Americans imagine they don’t fight wars for crass reasons of conquest or regional self-interest. They prefer grand battles of good and evil, part of a worldview that places “universalist narratives at the center of the human story.” Enemies are therefore cast not as mere competitors for resources or territory, but agents of Satanic influence:
Foreign rivals… can be painted as being “on the wrong side of history”, “against Progress”, “diabolical”, and so on… At the same time, these very causes are likely to be systematically de-emphasized in the cases of nations allied to the U.S—such as Saudi Arabia…
Three days after that paper was published, the Congressional Progressive Caucus, led by chair Pramila Jayapal of Washington, began circulating an anodyne letter calling for diplomacy in Ukraine. Addressed to President Joe Biden, the signatories urged a “proactive diplomatic push, redoubling efforts to seek a realistic framework for a ceasefire.” They were not calling for a cessation of military support. Instead, they wrote that because “the risk of nuclear weapons being used has been estimated to be higher now than at any time since the height of the Cold War,” and “nuclear escalation and miscalculation… only increase the longer this war continues,” Biden and the Democratic Party should at least explore a diplomatic solution.
The signatory list read like a Who’s Who of the House’s most Twitter-adored progressives, including New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Missouri’s Cori Bush, California’s Ro Khanna, Minnesota’s Ilhan Omar, and (please take note) Maryland’s Jamie Raskin. Several members, including Ocasio-Cortez, would eventually come under pressure from some leftist/antiwar constituents for appearing to support the expansion of the war effort.
The letter circulated for months, but wasn’t released until this Monday, October 24th. Though the press release on the CPC website opened with a line about the increased threat of nuclear war, it went on to frame the call for diplomacy in pragmatic political terms, citing a poll from the liberal Data for Progress outfit from September 27:
The majority of voters also support this call for diplomacy. Recent polling shows that 57 percent of Americans approve of U.S. negotiations to end the war in Ukraine as soon as possible, even if it means making some compromises with Russia. 57 percent believe that Russia’s war in Ukraine will end in a negotiated peace, not a total military victory for either side, and 59 percent largely agree that the U.S. has a leading role to play in negotiating an end to the war.
There’s no time when the letter wouldn’t have been politically complicated, but the timing was a little more painful for the signers for a few reasons. Speaker Nancy Pelosi was due to speak the next day in Zagreb, Croatia, where she’d promise at an international summit “our support is here to stay.” Meaning: if Democrats retain control of Congress after midterms, they will continue weapons shipments.
Moreover, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy the week before said the opposite, that “people are gonna be sitting in a recession and they’re not going to write a blank check to Ukraine.” Leading House progressives laying hands on the same political Twister squares as hated Republicans must have been deemed an unacceptably awkward visual.
With the kind of speed only possible in the Twitter age, the 30 signatories found themselves right away bot-bombed and fighting off accusations of collaborationism and fascist sympathy. So they did what nearly all intellectuals do when confronted with fleeting unpleasantness: they turned their faces completely inside out and renounced their own statements en masse.
You can continue reading on Matt’s site…
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-brutal-comedy-of-the-withdrawn
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Matt Taibbi was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and raised in the Boston suburbs. He is an American author, journalist, and podcaster. He is a contributing editor for Rolling Stone, author of several books, co-host of “Useful Idiots”, and publisher of a newsletter on Substack.
Taibbi began as a freelance reporter working in the former Soviet Union, including a period in Uzbekistan, from where he was deported for criticizing President Islam Karimov. Taibbi later worked as a sports journalist for the English-language newspaper The Moscow Times. He also played professional baseball in Uzbekistan and Russia as well as professional basketball in Mongolia. In 1997, he moved back to Russia to edit the tabloid Living Here, but eventually left to co-edit rival tabloid The eXile. Taibbi returned to the United States in 2002 and founded the Buffalo-based newspaper The Beast. He left in 2003 to work as a columnist for the New York Press. In 2004, Taibbi began covering politics for Rolling Stone.
In 2008, Taibbi won a National Magazine Award for three columns he wrote for Rolling Stone. In 2019, he launched the podcast “Useful Idiots”. In 2020, he began self-publishing his online writing, while still contributing to the “Useful Idiots” podcast and the print edition of Rolling Stone.
Taibbi has authored several books, including The Great Derangement (2009); Griftopia (2010); The Divide (2014); Insane Clown President (2017); I Can't Breathe (2017); and Hate Inc. (2019).
Taibbi famously branded Goldman Sachs a "vampire squid" in a 2009 article. His work has been compared with that of the great Hunter S. Thompson, who also covered politics for Rolling Stone.
“In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
George Orwell
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