Hormuz, Shipping Unions & Sailors

By Thomas Klikauer

April 11, 2026

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Corporate media prefer to talk about Donald Trump at a daily rate that has long surpassed other entertainers: the war of the USA and Israel against Iran, oil – where those who helped put Trump into the White House receive a handsome return on their investment – global shipping, and the Strait of Hormuz. Yet next to nobody mentions those who work on all those commercial ships waiting to pass through the Strait of Hormuz.

When looking at the world’s largest shipping nations, funny countries turn up: Liberia (a country with next to nothing to export), and the same goes for number two: Panama. Even more Mickey Mouse: the Marshall Islands (42,000 people). Maybe it needs so many container ships to export coconuts, tomatoes, melons, taro, breadfruit, fruits, pigs, and chickens.

Next on the list is a city: Hong Kong, followed by another city: Singapore. China is the first on the list with a serious shipping need. After that comes the tiny island of Malta. Perhaps its 520,000 people need all those container ships to export limestone and Maltese pastizzi. After that is the Bahamas – a tax haven. Number nine is Greece, with 10 million people and lots of cheese, ouzo, and rebetiko to export. Finally, there is Japan.

How is this possible? It is possible because all of them run what is known as flags of convenience (FOCs) – also known as Ships of Shame (SOS) – on their ships. In other words, it saves corporations a substantial amount in taxes to put a funny flag on your ship – Liberia, the Marshall Islands, Barbados, Antigua, Saint Kitts, the Cayman Islands, the Cook Islands, and so on. 

Meanwhile, countries with a serious shipping need tend to run so-called second registers. These are internal FOCs. It’s a bit like registering your car in a dodgy country: next to no tax, next to no technical checks, no questions asked.

Best of all, FOCs and international shipping are a perfect example of how state capitalism works. Huge profits are made by corporations, next to no taxes are paid, and yet, when there is a crisis somewhere in the world, all too often the state-funded navy is sent to protect commercial ships. In other words, profits go to corporations, and all other costs – seen as externalities – are offloaded onto the taxpayer who pays for protecting commercial shipping. This is how state-sponsored capitalism works.

It gets worse. Registering your multi-million-dollar container ship under an FOC not only saves you taxes, it also allows you to underpay your sailors – or better, not pay them at all. These ships are run by three groups of people: the captain (often European), officers (usually Eastern European), and finally the sailors, deckhands, or ratings. Filipinos make up almost 50%, Indians between 20–25%, with the rest being a mix of Vietnamese, Indonesians, and Chinese.

As always, in a hierarchical labour market, those down the chain of command suffer the most. Their working conditions and pay truly reflect the term Ships of Shame. This is the high price we pay for cheap imports from Shein to Alibaba, Walmart to Amazon, and so on.

Yet, while often suffering horrendous working conditions for microscopic pay, the US-Israeli attack on Iran and Lebanon has not only damaged the Middle East; civilian sailors in the Strait of Hormuz have almost received their death writs.

Fighting all this is the London-based International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF). The ITF condemns the ongoing attacks on civilian seafarers involved in the escalating war against Iran and the Middle East. For corporate media, the ships count, the oil and the oil price – not the human resources (another kind of material). Never mind the human.

Speaking of which: after declaring help is on the way for Iran, the orange monster in the White House now claims, A whole civilization will die tonight. While it may all be Trump’s typical TACO – Trump Always Chickens Out – it still has bitter consequences for seafarers.

With Donald Trump’s attack on Iran, workers in the global shipping industry will once again be directly in the line of fire. Since the United States of America and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury – a code word for killing – against Iran on February 28, ITF Seafarers’ Support has been receiving a large number of requests every day from seafarers seeking advice and support. Among the most frequent concerns are:

• the clarification of their rights;
• protective measures;
• repatriation applications; and
• questions about their right to refuse entry into the territory.

Meanwhile, the Strait of Hormuz has still not been declared a war zone. The result: more than 20,000 sailors on over 3,000 ships are affected, with very little notice given to these victims of war. Shipping is again in pandemic mode. Traffic in the Strait of Hormuz is almost paralysed.

No matter how Donald Trump’s illegal attack on Iran ends or continues, the merchant ships anchored in the Persian Gulf have sailors who are virtually trapped on board and will remain victims – until further notice. The ITF has urged their bosses to provide reliable supplies of food, clean water, fuel, and medical assistance. This is not an idle request. Seafarers have been starving in the not-too-distant past on these Ships of Shame. This is not optional; these are fundamental rights.

At the same time, no sailor should be expected to stay in a conflict area against their will – ratings are mostly men. Conditions on ships have historically been, to use the proper words, dehumanizing and often inhuman, despite the romantic hallucinations of Hollywood. 

It became necessary for the UN to establish a shipping organization known as the IMO. The IMO says that 20,000 sailors affected by the blockade have no parallel in history since the Second World War. For decades, never has such a large number of sailors been trapped in a war zone.

Apart from their acute physical and psychological needs, fears that the situation could deter future seafarers are growing. Some compare the current situation with the pandemic years. At that time – despite all the stupidities of anti-vaxxers like Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – there was at least the feeling here and there that someone, somewhere, was trying to save the lives of seafarers.

COVID-19 restrictions were harsh, but their intention was human. The current war could well be Trump’s destabilization of global shipping. In this, seafarers are all but the forgotten victims of the Strait of Hormuz. Yet people around the globe fear for supply chains, fossil fuels, and fertilizers. Meanwhile, some ship owners celebrate that they have defied Iran’s bombs.

In other words, ship owners continue to do what they have long done: haggle with the lives of sailors for a good fare, urging their crews to voluntarily cross war zones. Meanwhile, governments continue to abandon them, ignoring the demands of trade unions. Seafarers are in acute danger, and attacks on merchant ships have already been recorded, leading to deaths and injuries.

Crew members are forced to sign declarations that they – in full knowledge of the risks – take them on voluntarily. Ship owners know they can get away with it. How and where should you disembark? These ships do not call at ports, and they are not allowed to leave until a replacement crew arrives. So seafarers are forced to stay.

Ten sailors had resigned – their death writ – on one tanker in the Gulf alone. Judging by the usual crew strength of 15 to 25 people, this is a lot. If Donald Trump’s military operations were officially declared what they are – a war – crew members would have to be evacuated if they wished. Unions have so far unsuccessfully tried to get the International Maritime Organization (IMO) to intervene so that the Persian Gulf would be officially declared a war zone.

Sailing through the Strait of Hormuz is life-threatening. A Greek ship owner has nevertheless sent ships through the strait – despite protests from seafarers’ unions. Sailors have been demonstrating in Piraeus in solidarity with their colleagues stuck in the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. Workers have been rallying against the continued passage of Greek oil and gas tankers. The two leading Greek seafarers’ unions – Pemen and Stefenson – have called for this.

As so often in capitalism – some call it necrocapitalism, a system that profits from death – this is business with death cruises. While these supertankers make millions, seafarers are a disposable commodity. Ship owners defying threats in the Persian Gulf make immense profits through risky manoeuvres. Capitalism, pure and simple. Yet there is resistance among sailors to these dangerous missions – and it is growing.

For these death rides, ship owners make hundreds of thousands of dollars a day. When passing through the strait, ships turn off their tracking systems, making them harder for attackers to detect – but also harder for allies and rescuers to find. These ships remain visible only via radar or the naked eye.

Unsurprisingly, many seafarers feel abandoned by politicians and ship owners alike. Their accusation: enormous industry profits are made at the risk of sailors’ lives.

Governments must act now to protect seafarers. The ITF has called for immediate action after an emergency meeting at the International Maritime Organization. The world has recognized the danger faced by seafarers near the Strait of Hormuz – now governments need to act. Yet corporate media spend endless hours analysing every small move by Donald Trump. Seafarers are no news.

For the thousands of sailors still trapped in this region, facing threats to their lives every day, what matters now are urgent, practical measures to protect their safety, health, and dignity. The ITF has highlighted the reality they face: direct threats to life, disrupted navigation systems, limited access to food, water, fuel, and medical care, and severe restrictions on crew changes and repatriation. Seafarers are civilian workers. They are not parties to Donald Trump’s war – and they must never be treated as expendable.Email

Thomas Klikauer

Thomas Klikauer has over 800 publications (including 12 books) and writes regularly for BraveNewEurope (Western Europe), the Barricades (Eastern Europe), Buzzflash (USA), Counterpunch (USA), Countercurrents (India), Tikkun (USA), and ZNet (USA). One of his books is on Managerialism (2013).

The Anti-Science Campaign Nakedly Exposed

Robert Hunziker

 March 13, 2026

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Image by National Cancer Institute.

“Unless we find a way to overcome anti-science, humankind will face its gravest threat yet — the collapse of civilization as we know it… There is a highly organized well-funded campaign of antiscience, and it has now emerged as its own deadly force that not only makes it nearly impossible to combat future pandemics or the climate crisis but also touches on many other aspects of our daily lives.” (Michael E. Mann & Peter J. Hotez, Science Under Siege, Hachette Book Group, NY, 2025)

An Associated Press investigation found that more than 420 “anti-science” bills were introduced in statehouses last year, more are expected in 2026. .The world’s anti-science campaign has never been bolder, intentionally clobbering the credibility of climate change and biomedical science with bold-faced lies, and it is winning.

In the preface to their new book, Science Under Siege, Mann and Hotez explain in some gory detail their experience of 20 years of personal warfare against an invisible enemy that, at times, threatened their lives and intimidated their families, now fully exposed in the limelight of a very special extremely well-researched book that illuminates the five principal sources of antiscience (1) the plutocrats (2) the petrostates (3) the pros (4) the propagandists (5) our press.

It’s a resourceful book filled with factual data, naming names, identifying collaborators, heavily footnoted and written by leading scientists at the top of the profession known for solid scientific analysis. Mann and Hotez are accomplished well-respected in academia. Ironically, they are repeatedly attacked with falsehoods for telling the truth.

Their book is a roadmap that exposes this enemy of the truth: “We provide a road map for dismantling the antiscience machine… This book is a warning. But it is also a call to arms… When we first embarked on our doctoral training decades ago, we never thought we were signing up to be combatants in a war on science and scientists.” Their remarkable professional life story follows in the footsteps of a timeline of the epitome of science’s impact as a foundation of the health of society as the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s marked a golden era of public health in the United States, characterized by massive strides in controlling, preventing, and eliminating infectious diseases through vaccines, antibiotics, and improved sanitation, but sorrowfully, today’s insane rejection of that glorious golden era by anti-science collaborators is now an overwhelming destructive force of ‘the establishment.’ Along the way, “public assault by the GOP has diminished the public trust of science among conservatives.” (pg.6)

The Republican Party plays a feature role in the book by beating the anti-science drum purely for political purposes, e.g., “At the 2021 CPAC in Dallas, party faithful were warned that public health scientists will first vaccinate you and then take away your guns and Bibles.” (pg. 96) And that’s not all, climate advocates will “take away your hamburgers,” strip away your liberty and freedom, forcing vaccines on your children, dictating a socialist lifestyle, as the GOP targets low hanging political fruit to “weaponize the Republican base.” The GOP is one of the most far-reaching protagonists in Science Under Siege.

Threats to America’s scientists have become regular features of everyday working life: “Now every week, sometimes daily, we each receive online threats or harassing phone calls to our offices. On multiple occasions, we have faced actual physical confrontations and stalking. We are not alone, as many scientists working in the areas of biomedicine and climate science now encounter similar threats. You might assume that the aggressors are lone actors… but in many cases the attacks are government sanctioned, organized at the highest levels of the US Congress, with senators and members of the House of Representatives boasting of their efforts to intimidate prominent scientists.” (pg.5)

A far-right ‘creed of action’ targets scientists “making it easier to diminish the veracity of just about everything else. This makes science and scientists both prime targets.” (pg. 21) The political implications of demeaning science are profoundly rewarding for candidates that are willing to stoop low enough to reject acceptable, normalized moral values. In a 2021 speech at the National Conservatism Convention titled “The Universities Are the Enemy,” J.D. Vance (Yale, Law) said universities are the source of “deceit and lies, not… the truth.” and at the 2024 Republican National Convention, “professors are the enemy” (pg. 22).

Authoritarian/populist regimes throughout history have always relied upon convincing a citizenry that it is “aggrieved” as it remains docile and ignorant, easy targets; whereas a college education works against acceptance of widely broadcast phony claims used to accumulate political capital. A college education is the antithesis of successful far-right politics.

The overriding thesis of Mann/Hotez’s book, mentioned at the start of this article: “Unless we find a way to overcome anti-science, humankind will face its gravest threat yet — the collapse of civilization as we know it.” (pg.27)

The authors lay down the gauntlet, put up your dukes and fight back against this attack on the legacy of What Originally Made American Great, discoveries in science such as Jonas Salk’s discovery of the polio vaccine (1955), plus, study after study proves that federal funding for science is a primary fuel for economic growth, but cutting science ends discovery, aborting growth. Science is key to a strong economy but nowadays it’s subject to ridicule and cuts. Where does this leave America’s future?

Mann/Hotez devote several pages to ‘benevolent plutocrats’ people like Michael Bloomberg, who financially support major health and climate initiatives. On the other hand, “a small group of malevolent plutocrats… have collectively impeded efforts to act on the climate crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, or both.” (pg. 57) Several pages of the book are devoted to named/identified plutocrats who use underhanded methods to defy the truth of science as it interferes with their business interests or simply because they abhor centralized authority. Along those lines, dark money is at the core of disinformation. To fix this problem, the authors advocate nationwide legislation for total transparency of dark money sources, ‘name the names.’ Good luck with that!

The misinformation campaign has deep roots and a widespread reach. The plutocrat funders, some linked to the fossil fuel industry, and others in support of a far-right deregulatory agenda, support misinformation broadcasts by a core of “pros,” individuals with scientific credentials, doctoral degrees, certificates, etc. that are “lured by polluters and plutocrats and weaponized into a force to attack mainstream science and scientists (ed. money talks)… These pros often have a big platform, appearing as expert talking heads on Fox News or other conservative media… There are also the paid propagandists with no scientific credentials but plenty of media savvy and access to wide platforms.” (pg. 109)

Of special mention: “Several (pros) have been tapped for leadership positions in the second Trump administration. They are known for an aggressive offense, as they spearhead attacks against scientists, working overtime to dehumanize and discredit them. They are our most aggressive and unrelenting detractors and are typically well renumerated for their efforts. In some cases, they are worth tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars.” (pgs. 109-10)

Readers get a peek at what the authors refer to as ‘The Deniers Club,” starting on page 110, inclusive of cartoonish images of named climate deniers going back to the 1990s with analyses of their disruptive work to upset the climate change applecart with innuendo and phony institutional-sounding titles to appear scientifically official, denigrating real climate science. One favorite cartoonish image says: “Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. On the contrary, it makes crops and forest grow faster.” As a long-time researcher/writer, I’ve personally had that thrown at me several times. Evidently, it’s a well-accepted misdirection tool.

To counter the mischief of anti-science fabrications, there is a hub of information that scrutinizes disinformation called Center for Countering Digital Hate established in the U.S. and UK. They research groups spreading hate and disinformation. They specifically focus on climate and vaccine misinformation. According to CCDH, antivaccine organized groups have learned to monetize their misinformation to the tune of $1.2 billion with tens of millions of followers across platforms. It therefore has become a thriving business to misinform the public. Big name anti-vaxxers are prominently named and covered in this section of the book.

It’s Metastasizing

A haunting, important message appears on page 223: “We have seen this cancer begin to metastasize across the Western Hemisphere, spreading from the United States and Canada into Europe, Australia and beyond. It now pervades low- and middle-income countries on the African continent and in Asia.” Wow!

The Path Forward, pgs. 219-262 offers solutions, one example: “As we argued earlier, we (scientists) can join with our fellow scientists and organize and pressure academic and scientific institutions to take a more proactive stance against antiscientific disinformation and to provide support and defense for scientists subject to concerted right-wing attacks.”

Science Under Siege is an eye-opener of the breadth and depth of the anti-science behemoth not only in America but around the world, like a virus, it creeps along consuming standards of society that have been set for decades; distorting world order by undermining ‘establishment’ society, squirming far and wide, a sliminess seldom encountered within elongated jumbles of innuendo and lies, thriving on a mindless public, and it works! Anti-science is a successful enterprise. It pockets tons of money by denigrating and dismissing the most valuable science in all of human history.

Facing the future, for believers in the deep values of science, Science Under Siege may be the most important book of this decade. It is wonderfully annotated, almost every page jam-packed with important factual data, and by all standards a work of academic artisans. If only the world reads it, comprehends it, reacts to it, civilized society, at the very least, will have a fighting chance.

The Battle Plan (pgs. 252-62) concludes this remarkable one-of-a-kind book with a four-part approach to squelching the most hideous attack on science since the year 1600 when Giordano Bruno, Italian philosopher and cosmologist, stripped naked, leather strap sealing his mouth, burned at the stake at the hands of The Inquisition/Rome for preaching existence of a heliocentric universe and rejecting the Trinity and the divinity of Christ.

1. Penalize the Pros, Propagandists, and Petrostates, pg.252

2. Pressure the Plutocrats, pg. 254

3. Mend the Media, pg. 255

4. Be the Change, pg. 256

For a final note, one small victory in this battle for truth: Eight States Are Banning Book Bans. Will It Work? Education Week d/d January 2, 2026.

Robert Hunziker lives in Los Angeles and can be reached at rlhunziker@gmail.com.

A Dangerous Attack on Free Speech: Matt Taibbi Sues for Defamation

By Chris Green

January 21, 2026

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

ReasonTV, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

In November of last year, in an egregious abuse of defamation law, former progressive journalist  (and current right wing influencer) Matt Taibbi launched a lawsuit–presently ongoing–claiming to have been defamed by leftist journalist Eoin Higgins (and Higgins’s publisher Hachette Book Group), ludicrously alleging “reputational and financial damages”, according to the official legal complaint, “in excess of $1,000,000.” Taibbi claims that his integrity as a journalist was defamed by Higgins’s book Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left. The book–released in February 2025–alleges that Taibbi and another previously progressive journalist, Glenn Greenwald, have moved to the right politically in recent years as a result of developing professional connections with pro-MAGA Silicon Valley billionaires like Elon Musk and David Sacks. 

Taibbi’s lawsuit focuses on the book’s statements that Taibbi was “owned” and “bought” by Elon Musk after he participated in Musk’s Twitter Files campaign of 2022-23– the latter being where Taibbi and half a dozen other journalists received from Musk tens of thousands of internal company documents produced under Twitter’s pre-Musk owners. In their published analysis on Twitter threads, Taibbi and the other journalists handpicked by Musk (like the right wingers Michael Shellenberger and Bari Weiss) offered support for Musk’s contention that the documents proved that pre-Musk Twitter was immensely biased against conservatives and even secretly collaborated with the Biden administration in suppressing pro-Trump voices and anti-vaxxers. Taibbi insists he didn’t receive a dime from Musk for his work.

Taibbi’s Case

In my opinion, Taibbi’s lawsuit against Higgins has the marks of a SLAPP case: an abuse of the legal system by a powerful person or organization in order to silence a critic of much less power and influence. Based on publicly available evidence, it is extremely difficult to accept Taibbi’s claim that Higgins’s book has brought “harm” to his journalistic career and caused him a million dollars in damages.

First of all, there is a vast asymmetry and power and influence between Higgins and Taibbi.  Higgins is a relatively obscure left wing journalist whose work has previously been confined to such outlets as The New Republic, Common Dreams and Counterpunch;  his book on Taibbi and Greenwald has not received wide discussion in the mainstream media (although it has had some). In contrast, Taibbi, with his move to the right politically, has become a visible presence on widely viewed right wing media and has attracted favorable publicity from some of the most influential right wing personalities in the world; for example, in June (five months after Higgins published his book), Joe Rogan, on his hugely popular podcast, singled out Taibbi and Greenwald as journalists he trusts for “unbiased news.” Taibbi was picked by the world’s richest man, Musk to work on the Twitter Files; and as Higgins notes in his book, in 2022 Taibbi sat on a stage with Greenwald and beamed as he was interviewed in highly friendly fashion by David Sacks, the Silicon Valley billionaire who is now the AI and cryptocurrency czar for the Trump administration. During the interview, Sacks lavished Taibbi and Greenwald with praise as iconoclastic journalists. 

Taibbi has presented no evidence that Higgins’s book has made any appreciable impact on the relations that he as a journalist  has cultivated with influential people like Rogan, Sacks et. al or brought any real damage to his journalistic credibility with the general public.

Second, it is extremely difficult to accept Taibbi’s claim that Higgins’s book comes close to meeting the defamation standard of “actual malice” and “reckless disregard for truth” as described in the US Supreme Court’s 1964 case of New York Times Co. v. Sullivan. 

Taibbi’s defamation claim focuses on Higgins’s assertion of Taibbi being “owned” and “bought” by Elon Musk–and having “cashed in”  on his relationship with the latter. Taibbi’s legal claim notes (accurately) that while uttering these words, Higgins also admitted in the book and in subsequent published interviews that he could not prove the existence of any financial transactions between Musk and Taibbi. He also allowed in the book and in subsequent interviews that Taibbi’s primary motives are probably much less titillating than mere grift: that he has likely sincerely grown more conservative as he has aged. 

At the same, Taibbi’s lawsuit ignores the expansive context in which Higgins uses words like “bought” and “owned,” which he defines more broadly than Taibbi merely receiving financial compensation from Musk. In his book, Higgins uses those words to connote something along the lines of “a journalist being under the disproportionate influence of an immensely wealthy and powerful person.”

Even if Taibbi worked for free on the Twitter Files (as he seems to have), Higgins argues that at the same time, he disregarded basic journalistic ethics and served Elon Musk’s agenda of using the Twitter Files as a “controlled infodump” to provide fodder for right wing culture wars:  for example material on pre-Musk Twitter’s suppression of posts about the New York Post story on the Hunter Biden laptop. 

Musk’s people curated the Files material for Taibbi: he sent “keywords” to them on various topics and they sent him what they chose to. There was no material released, for example, about the scandal of Saudi government agents employed within pre-Musk Twitter using their positions to access data on the accounts of dissidents to spy on them and pinpoint their locations. The Saudis, of course, were major partners of Musk in his 2022 purchase of Twitter.  

 Higgins also attacks Taibbi for refusing to criticize Musk publicly–for example regarding Musk’s collaboration in the censorship of Twitter posts by Narendra Modi’s government in India–at least until Musk directly hit Taibbi’s pocketbook in April 2023 by shadowbanning tweets containing material from Substack, Taibbi’s main writing platform. 

As for the words “cashed in,” Higgins claims in his book that Taibbi’s work on the Twitter Files gained him massive publicity among the conservative Americans he was “desperate to cultivate” and his Substack page Racket News “already incredibly successful–gained thousands of subscriptions.” Taibbi, in contrast, has always implausibly tried to downplay any wealth he has gained from his increased exposure on right wing media. His formal legal complaint against Higgins states, perhaps truthfully, that he actually “lost money for the first time in his career as an independent journalist” while working on the Twitter Files, especially after Musk decided to limit circulation of Substack material on Twitter. .

Whatever the criticism one might legitimately make against Higgins’s critique of Taibbi, it is clear that it is protected speech: Taibbi has no grounds for suing Higgins, much less claiming a million dollars in damages against him. 

Taibbi Wants Leftist Love

Taibbi did his lawsuit no favors with his January 3rd piece in Bari Weiss’s The Free Press entitled “To Protect Free Speech, I’m Suing the Man Who Defamed Me.” In the piece he doesn’t list any tangible harm that Higgins’s book has materially inflicted upon his journalistic career–much less any harm worth a million dollars in damages. Rather, with surprising transparency, he states that he is suing Higgins because progressives–ranging from Democratic congressmembers and former journalistic colleagues to random internet trolls– have been saying very harsh, even slanderous things about him in recent years (long before Higgins published his book). Not without poignancy he writes: “I’m fed up. I’m pissed.” He  reveals a seemingly intense psychological anguish about his lost cachet among progressives and radical leftists. 

It seems odd that Taibbi, a journalist who has moved so palpably to the right in recent years, would be so sensitive about what leftists are saying about him. He is somebody who, for example, last June, described the main features of the anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles as allegedly being violence by protestors and “revolting homages to Marx and socialist revolution” on the part of the protestors. However, he also clearly still feels a few bonds of affinity with leftists and is deeply upset that he has not been reciprocated. 

A major part of his Free Press essay devoted to defending his lawsuit against Higgins features him complaining about how leftists have given him no respect for his Twitter Files work–or for the fact that, during Trump’s first term, he covered in Rolling Stone the suppression by social media companies of posts by left wing figures like Chris Hedges, Paul Jay of the Real News Network, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) as well as Palestinian voices. He claims that his Twitter Files work showed government officials, in the US and elsewhere, privately pressuring Twitter to suppress tweets by “left-wing voices along with the right, from Truthdig, to Italian left-populists…to the French yellow-vest movement.” 

Taibbi whimpers that in spite of such heroic muckraking journalism on his part, he was smeared by leftists like Higgins and many others as “a paid shill for billionaire scum” for his Twitter Files involvement. Nonsensically trying to add to his arguments for suing Higgins, he also complains that such leftists spread “falsehoods” about him in the wake of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. He explains that he believed he “made the ethical decision” not to side with the Palestinians during the (ongoing) Gaza genocide “because I’d never covered the Israel-Palestine conflict” as a journalist and “didn’t want to be wrong about one of the most complex stories ever.” He argues that if he criticized anti-genocide student protestors in 2023-24 for supposedly not knowing anything about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and for supposedly obstructing the rights of other students in their sit-ins and other civil disobedience, he did so out of sincere conviction and not because, as he claims Higgins implied, he was taking money from right wing billionaires. 

The Bottom Line

It seems to me highly disingenuous on Taibbi’s part to try to prove that he was not under Elon Musk’s ideological influence by implying that in his Twitter Files work he covered suppression of the left by social media companies as much as he did of the right. 

His tidbits for the left in the Twitter Files–one instance of officials in the first Trump administration privately requesting censorship of a tweet or FBI agents pestering Twitter officials about a Truthdig article–were mere drops in a bucket–usually single tweet threads–compared to the lengthy threads that he and his Twitter Files colleagues like Bari Weiss published as right wing fodder for the culture wars. Taibbi and Weiss,for example, focused almost all their attention on Twitter’s suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, the shadowbanning of tweets by vaccine sceptics or pre-Musk Twitter’s multiple suspensions of the account of the virulently anti-LGTBQ Libs of TikTok. There was nothing in the Twitter Files about pre-Musk Twitter’s suppression of Palestinian voices. 

Also, Taibbi engages in a bit of obfuscation by defending his Twitter Files work by including his Rolling Stone reporting on the various social media platforms’ suppression of posts by leftists like Chris Hedges, DSA, WSWS, Palestinians, etc. which he did before he made a marked turn to the right politically, developed a relationship with Elon Musk and began work on the Twitter Files. During the launch of the Twitter Files in late 2022, Musk’s Twitter engaged in suppression of radical left voices, but Taibbi made no public comment even as he gave public credence to Musk’s claim to being a free speech devotee. 

In his whining about getting no respect from leftists in recent years–and thereby ludicrously trying to justify his lawsuit against Higgins–Taibbi’s arguments are mostly silly and disingenuous but perhaps he is right in one major way. In spite of major errors in some of his Twitter Files reporting, Taibbi did ultimately valuably reveal that Biden administration officials were improperly seeking to pressure Twitter and other social media platforms to remove posts by private citizens, even if such posts were by anti-vaxxers and other persons who were potentially causing a public nuisance during the height of the Covid pandemic. I don’t think critics like Higgins have given him enough credit for that. That does not mean that Taibbi’s lawsuit against Higgins is anything but an egregious abuse of defamation law.