Taibbi: Trump Has A “Once In A Lifetime” Chance For Disclosure
Quoth The Raven
I was incredibly stoked to have my friend and Substack compatriot Matt Taibbi on today for an hourlong chat about the mainstream media’s implosion, the new administration, spending cuts and the unique opportunity this administration has to shatter the Orwellian path the nation has been put on by the establishment and legacy media.
Few voices in journalism today have been as incisive and unfiltered as Matt Taibbi’s. Once a staple of Rolling Stone, Taibbi has become one of the most vocal critics of mainstream media, corporate influence, and the failures of American journalism.
Now, as one of the leading voices on Substack, he has watched firsthand as the landscape of media and politics undergoes tectonic shifts.
The Exodus to Substack: “A Universe is Healing” Moment
The conversation opened with an amusing yet telling observation: Jim Acosta, once a CNN mainstay and vocal critic of independent platforms, had landed on Substack after his unceremonious departure from CNN. Taibbi couldn’t help but note the irony.
“Most of us who came to Substack early came here either because we were purged from mainstream media organizations, or in my case, I just sort of read the writing on the wall and felt like it was going to be a better move for me career-wise,” he said.
Acosta’s arrival, along with other legacy media figures like Jennifer Rubin and Norm Eisen, signals a broader shift, he said. Once dismissive of independent platforms as “grifters and losers,” these same journalists are now scrambling to find an audience in a media world that no longer guarantees them a corporate paycheck.
“I mean, I won’t be surprised to see Joy Reid here in a few weeks,” Taibbi quipped during our hourlong chat.
He pointed to the collapse of audience trust in legacy institutions as a driving force behind this exodus. The public, he argues, has woken up to the reality that mainstream news is not about truth but about feeding an audience what it wants to hear—an “audience optimization model.”
“They got away from this idea that we’ve got to be right. Even if we’re going to be slanted, we can’t screw things up. And so what they’re doing now—they’re seeing their numbers plummet, and their first instinct is, well, let’s just get rid of the people who have the worst numbers.”
But as he noted, firing low-rated hosts doesn’t fix the deeper problem: they have no plan to win back public trust.
The Death Spiral of Corporate Media
As legacy media layoffs pile up and the industry scrambles for solutions, Taibbi remains skeptical that any major course correction is coming.
“What you see right now is almost complete paralysis at these big media organizations. They really don’t know what to do.”
Rather than reassessing their flawed model, major networks are doubling down, attempting to “optimize” their content for the dwindling loyal audience they still have.
“They’re not coming up with a new ethos for how to cover things. They’re seeing their numbers collapse, and their first instinct is to just fire the people who have the highest negatives when they do their surveys. But they don’t have a replacement strategy.”
The case of Joy Reid’s firing at MSNBC underscored the point. The network, rather than innovating, was resorting to desperate measures like bringing back Rachel Maddow for more frequent programming.
Watch the entire video interview with Matt Taibbi here. [Enter your E-Mail to watch]
The Establishment’s Unraveling: Government, the Fed, and the Demand for Transparency
Beyond the world of media, Taibbi turned his attention to the broader collapse of public trust in American institutions. Whether it’s government secrecy, corporate corruption, or Federal Reserve manipulation, he sees a reckoning on the horizon.
We talked the renewed push to audit both the Federal Reserve and Fort Knox.
“It’s fascinating,” Taibbi said. “I mean, first of all, the auditing of Fort Knox idea, I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t have floated that if they hadn’t already taken a look.”
If there’s something to uncover, he suggested, it might be far more unsettling than the public expects.
Meanwhile, calls for a full-scale audit of the Federal Reserve have been intensifying. While previous attempts, such as those led by Ron Paul, fell short, Taibbi sees a growing public appetite for holding the central bank accountable.
“The Fed has very strict trading rules, I’m sure, for a reason,” I said to Matt, referring to recent scandals involving top Fed officials engaging in unethical trading. “But the Fed-controlled macroeconomic universe is so vast now that just a sneeze from one of these guys moves the market by quadrillions of dollars.”
We talked about the controversy back in 2022 about Raphael Bostic, the Atlanta Fed president caught violating trading rules and trading S&P futures.
I asked, “First question: why do Fed governors need to be trading S&P futures in the first place? Buy a fucking index fund. You don’t need to be in the fucking futures market moving 1,000 lots.”
The Public’s Demand for Disclosure: A Once-in-a-Lifetime Opportunity?
The conversation eventually turned to what he sees as an unprecedented moment in history—a rare window where the public is demanding accountability like never before.
“I don’t think in our lifetimes there’s ever going to be an opportunity to get some of that stuff out there like there is right now,” he said, referring to transparency efforts across media, government, and finance.
I noted: “If we make the public aware of exactly where all this money is going… people are going to be forced to look back on it—including the nefarious actors—and say, ‘Hey, we were a little sloppy last time. We need to clean it up a little bit.’ And sadly, I feel like that’s the best we can hope for.”
Still, he’s not optimistic that change will come easily.
“They’ve forgotten that information doesn’t belong to them,” he said of government bureaucracies withholding classified material. “There isn’t some separate group of people who have a particularized interest in keeping that secret that supersedes ours. That’s just a fictitious thing they’ve convinced us to believe.”
Whether it’s long-classified JFK files, hidden financial records, or revelations about the intelligence community’s past actions, Taibbi sees no justification for keeping the public in the dark.“They better release everything,” he warned. “People are going to get impatient.”
What Comes Next?
As the interview wound down, one thing was clear—whether in media, government, or finance, the establishment is fighting to hold onto its crumbling authority. But with every desperate move they make, they only accelerate their own demise.
This conversation was another reminder of why independent voices are more crucial than ever. In a world where media giants crumble and governments fight tooth and nail to keep secrets, the truth has never been more important.
Taibbi sees the current moment as a unique chance to shake things up. The collapse of mainstream media, the discrediting of political elites, and the exposure of financial corruption all point to a rare opportunity to rewire the system. Whether that happens, though, depends on whether the public stays engaged.
“The public is not going to accept the buildup that we had again,” he said. “At least that’s what I’m hoping.”
For now, Substack and independent platforms are filling the void left by a media industry that has abandoned journalism in favor of narrative control. As for the institutions that have held power for decades?
Their reckoning may only just be beginning. (WATCH THE FULL HOUR-LONG VIDEO INTERVIEW WITH MATT TAIBBI HERE) [Enter your E-Mail to watch (Subscribe) ]
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