Matt Taibbi On the Twitter Files, Julian Assange, and Donald Trump

October 17, 2023

“After Trump, everybody’s tolerance for exploring different points of view kind of dried up,” says the star Substack writer.

by Nick Gillespie Reason.com

Matt Taibbi is the author of four New York Times bestsellers. As Rolling Stone’s campaign reporter in 2016—and an early critic of how the mainstream media covered allegations of Russian interference in the presidential election—he concluded that political journalism was hyper-focused on the “pursuit of getting rid of Donald Trump.”

When Taibbi started publishing his work on Substack in 2020, he quickly became one of the platform’s most popular writers. He also was the first journalist to write about the Twitter Files, a collection of behind-the-scenes discussions revealed after Elon Musk bought the social media platform. Reason’s Nick Gillespie sat down with Taibbi at FreedomFest in Memphis, Tennessee, in July to talk about the Twitter Files, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, Donald Trump, and more.