counterpunch | In the opening moments of their conversation, Taibbi repented for not
making a big stink over Weinstein’s ostracism and eventual resignation
from Evergreen over student protests. Suing the school for $3.8 million
in damage, Weinstein walked away with only a half-million.
One wonders if Taibbi looked into the case against Weinstein made by
three Evergreen professors that year on Huffington Post titled “Another Side of The Evergreen State College Story”.
One of them was Zoltan Grossman, who has written dozens of articles for
CounterPunch over the years. The three make an essential point:
In order for a propaganda campaign to succeed, it needs a Big Lie. At Evergreen, the Big Lie is that Evergreen’s Day of Absence demonstrated “reverse racism” as whites “were forced to leave campus because of the color of their skin.” It is stunning to us how often this “alternative fact” has been repeated until it has become unchallenged truth. The truth is that the Day of Absence has long been an accepted — and voluntary — practice at Evergreen. On the Day of Absence, people of color who chose to do so generally attended an off-campus event, while whites who chose to participate stayed on campus to attend lectures, workshops and discussions about how race and racism shape social structures and everyday life.
Once they got past the Evergreen business, Weinstein and Taibbi
settled into a litany of how bad things have gotten in the U.S. because
of uppity anti-racist students dragging the country down. They struck me
as two middle-aged men ready to write a book titled “The Decline of the
U.S.” after the fashion of Oswald Spengler. They probably could make
good money writing such a book since there is always a market for
screeds against political correctness, identity politics, and that sort
of thing. Usually written by conservatives like Allan Bloom (“The
Closing of the American Mind”), they also have their liberal
counterparts like Todd Gitlin, who wrote “The Twilight of Common Dreams:
Why America is Wracked by Culture Wars” in 1996.
Gitlin, who signed the Harper’s letter, described himself in the book
as sympathetic to blacks but was distressed by their retreat into what
he felt were self-absorbed, symbolic politics, according to a N.Y. Times
review. He wrote that “few political campaigns are launched against the
impoverishment of the cities” and that “The diversity rhetoric of
identity politics short-circuits the necessary discussion of what ought
to be done about all the dying out there.” He had come to the same
conclusions as Adolph Reed Jr., who also got the red-carpet treatment
from Taibbi and Halper.
Weinstein gushed over Taibbi’s long record of courageous journalism
as if writing take-downs of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump risked a
jail term. Yes, Taibbi is entertaining, but how far can you go stating
the obvious, even if scabrously. I’d prefer a little less scabrousness
and a lot more economic analysis. That’s one of the reasons I stopped
reading Taibbi after the good old “vampire squid” days ended.
