An interview with Luke O’Neil
“This desire for a false sense of normalcy that drives so much of the media and so much of DC. You hear a lot about the day after 9/11 when we all ‘came together’ and I think a lot of these fu – sorry – a lot of these idiots actually long for that while ignoring all of the chaos and destruction and murder that came out of the feeling of us all being together. It’s a very dangerous thing when America is all on the same page.”
Listen to the the full intereview here.
Manufacturing Fear and Loathing, Maximizing Corporate Profits!
Matt Taibbi’s Hate Inc. is the most insightful and revelatory book about American politics to appear since the publication of Thomas Frank’s Listen, Liberal almost four full years ago, near the beginning of the last presidential election cycle.
While Frank’s topic was the abysmal failure of the Democratic Party to be democratic and Taibbi’s is the abysmal failure of our mainstream news corporations to report news, the prominent villains in both books are drawn from the same, or at least overlapping, elite social circles: from, that is, our virulently anti-populist liberal class, from our intellectually mediocre creative class, from our bubble-dwelling thinking class. In fact, I would strongly recommend that the reader spend some time with Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? (2004) and Listen, Liberal! (2016) as he or she takes up Taibbi’s book. And to really do the book the justice it deserves, I would even more vehemently recommend that the reader immerse him- or herself in Taibbi’s favorite book and vade-mecum, Manufacturing Consent (which I found to be a grueling experience: a relentless cataloging of the official lies that hide the brutality of American foreign policy) and, in order to properly appreciate the brilliance of Taibbi’s chapter 7, “How the Media Stole from Pro Wrestling,” visit some locale in Flyover Country and see some pro wrestling in person (which I found to be unexpectedly uplifting — more on this soon enough).
Read the full review here.
The Ridley Plan was a masterclass in strategising for transformative economic change. What would a left equivalent look like today?
In 1977, Tory backbencher Nicholas Ridley presented Margaret Thatcher with a report unglamorously titled ‘Final Report of the Nationalised Industries Policy Group’ – later to become known as the ‘Ridley Plan’.
Ridley, the son of a wealthy family whose coal and steel interests had been nationalised under the Attlee government, was implacably opposed to public ownership. And beneath its innocuous title, the Ridley Plan amounted to an astonishingly ruthless and hard-headed battle plan for privatisation – one which was to guide the Thatcherites’ assault on the nationalised industries, and whose repercussions are still with us today.
The Ridley Plan prefigures almost all of the key moments in the long neoliberal assault on public ownership, from the open war against the miners to the privatisation “by stealth” (Ridley’s own words) of the NHS. It suggests that Thatcher pick her battles, provoking confrontations in “non-vulnerable industry, where we can win” such as the railways and the civil service, while taking steps to create the conditions for eventual victory against the more powerful trade unions. It outlines a plan to prepare the ground for privatisation by introducing market measures in the running of nationalised industries (such as changes of leadership, targets for return on capital, and new incentives for managers), and fragmenting the public sector into independent units that could later be sold off.
Read the full essay here.
October 31, 2019: The media, impeachment, and 2020 w/Matt Taibbi
Chip talks with Rolling Stone Contributing Editor and National Magazine Award winner Matt Taibbi his new book, Hate Inc. is available now.
Listen to the show here.
Reins on Big Tech? Matt Taibbi!
European efforts to protect users from Big Tech could work here too. German activists share. PLUS: Rolling Stone writer/editor Matt Taibbi on impeachment, Russiagate, “the deep state”, and media. Hosted by Kris Welch.
Listen to the show here.
Author Luke O’Neil will read passages from his brutal new book Welcome to Hell World, a text that starkly explores grim current events in the United States.
If you don’t know Luke O’Neil’s words, prepare to be freshly bummed out by the state of daily political life in the United States. O’Neil writes long, meandering essays analyzing and critiquing timely topics like healthcare, fascism, and the corrosive effect of Fox News in his newsletter, Welcome to Hell World: Dispatches From the New American Dystopia, which he recently turned into a book of the same name, now available from OR Books. He will be reading passages from the nearly 600-page tome for the PageTurners reading series this coming week in Downtown Brooklyn.
O’Neil’s writing is full of indictments of people in power, and by way of disclosure, I was proud to overlap with him at Esquire a few years back. In his newsletter and in his book, O’Neil treats current events as a sort of literary post-apocalypse. Sample essay titles include “I would want to drink their blood” (about the deaths of children in Iraq) and “Give us the money or we’ll kill your son” (an interview with a young man who from El Salvador who fled MS-13). Despite the brutal rhetorical approach, O’Neil’s writing is both humane and full of humans — real people whose lives are torn apart by bad policy. And ultimately his words help us see the grim realities around us a little more clearly. The reading is free, but seating is limited, so get there early.
When: Monday, November 4, 7-9 pm
Where: DeKalb Market Hall (445 Albee Square W, Downtown Brooklyn)
Read the full event posting here.
Thoughts And Prayers’ Author On How To Recover The Meaning Of Words We Use Again And Again
Here & Now’s Lisa Mullins speaks with Alissa Quart (@lisquart), author of poetry book “Thoughts and Prayers” about how to recover the true meaning of words that we use again and again in the news and in our culture.
Read the full radio show here.
Consciousness: Just Two Guys Talking
Consciousness comes in all kinds of flavors — political, ecological, historical, psychological, etc. Even an awareness of unconsciousness can be a kind of consciousness, such as when we refer to, say, the archetypal realm of the Collective Unconscious, which is a kind of consciousness of gene-level symbolism. In fact, a good place for understanding what consciousness is may start with what it isn’t — unconsciousness. I guess it depends on what your definition of isn’t isn’t.
A few years ago I was in a coma for a week. I was an Isn’t — and yet I was. (Kinda like that catchy Donovan song.) While the functions of my biology were artificially maintained by machines, my brain activity had flat-lined. My consciousness slowly returned, and I came out of a void, without emotions, doing my best imitation of Lazarus. What did I bring back with me — Light at the end of questioning tunnels? Myopic insight into the realms of the beyond? Nothing. I brought back nothing. A week had been cut from my life, no memories, no resonances, no nothing. If that was death, then there is no Inferno, Purgatorio, or Beatrice. However, I regained full “consciousness,” as far as I am aware.
So, consciousness requires you to be awake and aware, and then you go from there. The world opens up before you and you read it, experience it, with your agenda, your style, your orientation, within the context of the circumstances that govern your milieu. Consciousness. How would you approach the question? Well, I tried taking the online Jung Typology Type test — that proved to be uncannily accurate, in some respects. Of course, this doesn’t answer the question of what consciousness is, but it does provide some insight into what filters you might use in your approach, and puts you in the starting “subjective” position to relate to the “objective” world. The ol’ In/Out of experience.
Read the full review here.
The Annihilation of Julian Assange
I was deeply shaken while witnessing yesterday’s events in Westminster Magistrates Court. Every decision was railroaded through over the scarcely heard arguments and objections of Assange’s legal team, by a magistrate who barely pretended to be listening.
Before I get on to the blatant lack of fair process, the first thing I must note was Julian’s condition. I was badly shocked by just how much weight my friend has lost, by the speed his hair has receded and by the appearance of premature and vastly accelerated aging. He has a pronounced limp I have never seen before. Since his arrest he has lost over 15 kg in weight.
Read the full piece here.
Julian Assange: Countdown to Freedom, Continues
Today on Flashpoints: We continue with our multi-year series, Julian Assange; Countdown to Freedom, with Randy Credico, of Live on The Fly. Today we are joined by former British Ambassador, Craig Murray. Later we speak with civil rights attorney, author, Margaret Ratner Kunstler, about her book, In Defense of Julian Assange.
Listen to the show here.
We Need More Poetry in Politics
Camonghne Felix became the director of surrogates and strategic communications for Senator Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign in June. She is also the author of “Build Yourself a Boat,” a debut collection of poetry that was recently included on the long list for a National Book Award. Ms. Felix’s writings describe sexual assault, firsthand experience of abortion, and police violence, including poems about the trial of George Zimmerman, the man who shot Trayvon Martin.
Read the full op-ed here.
Where Poetry Meets Journalism
For nearly two weeks in 2018, poet Doug Van Gundy and photographer Matt Eich interviewed residents of Webster County, West Virginia. They talked with gravediggers and teachers and diner cooks. They had coffee with an ex-military man who sold sawmill equipment; they visited the county clerk’s office, filled with boxes of election materials; they watched an elementary school Christmas play and concert. All along the way they asked those they met: What is it like to live here? What do you wish others knew about your life? With permission Van Gundy would record each conversation or take notes, and Eich would make photographs.
Read the full profile here.
Interview With Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone Reporter And Author Of HATE INC.
For this week’s episode, Rania Khalek and Kevin Gosztola interviewed Matt Taibbi, a Rolling Stone reporter and author of the recently released book, Hate Inc: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another.
Taibbi is also a host of the new hit podcast from Rolling Stone called “Useful Idiots.” He co-hosts the show with Katie Halper, and it often has more listeners (per week) than “Pod Save America.”
He starts by describing some of his experience in journalism and what led him to write this insightful and enjoyable polemic about the media.
Taibbi agrees that cable news is terribly grating on our nerves, and he talks about why that’s the case. He also describes how the media sells us an identity.
Later in the show, we discuss what happens when media elites decide someone is or should be viewed as a pariah (like Tulsi Gabbard). We speculate on how Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren might do against President Donald Trump.
And Taibbi shares his opinion on the media’s lack of solidarity with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who is the first journalist to be charged with violating the Espionage Act.
Listen to the show here.
Assange: Enema of the State
Crikey, he gives them the shits.
Hillary once said — even before the 2016 election — “Can’t we just drone him?”
Maybe you’re thinking she was just joking, like Obama that time at the White House Correspondents Dinner in 2010, when he cracked that he’d take out the Jonas Brothers with a Predator drone strike, if they got grabby with his daughters. Laughter all around. Of course, the joke was on them, because there was no drone warfare program at the time, WINK. Obama wouldn’t acknowledge the existence of such drone usage until he zapped out Anwar al-Awlaki a year later, and his 16 year-old son, Abdulrahman,shortly thereafter, both Americans.
The MSM darn near bust a gut. (The joke’s been told over and over since. Punch line here.)
Julian Assange had warmed the Press up nearly a month earlier when he released the top secret “Collateral Murder” video into the wilds of the public imagination. You could hear all kinds of laughter from the gunship soldiers machine-gunning away at civilians, like Chuck Connors, Russian mole, in the film Embassy. Rat-a-tat-tat! Who knew the War on Terror could be so funny? You don’t even want to call The Hague and file a report, you’re laughing so hard.
And he followed up that gag with a bing-bang-boom fusillade: the Afghan War Logs (all those unreported haw-haw casualties); the Iraq War Logs had Abu rolling over in his graib, with laughter; Cablegate released all that global goss and started the Arab Spring (Tunisia 2011); the Guantánamo Files — so many Code Reds the bulls went insane; the Spy Files demonstrated “the industrialization of global mass surveillance” — what an effing hoot; the Syria Files made Assad shoot off laughing gas at the rebels; elites fell over themselves, like drunken clowns, when Assange published “the secret draft of the TransPacific Partnership (TPP)”; the Saudi Cables brought on the Curly Shuffle in Riyadh.
You almost couldn’t believe that a guy who one wag described as having had a “wild…Tom Sawyer-like” childhood could cause so much angst. Why, he even spent his early years in an honest-to-goodness Jumping Frog of Calaveras County atmosphere on a small island, called Magnetic. How could he be found so unattractive by so many? When he moved to mainland Oz for his teen years he became John Connor, where he had his whole future in the rearview mirror, and spent his time in MILNET “hacking Pentagon generals’ emails,” he tells Ai WeiWei in the new collection of testimonials and supportive documents that make up In Defense of Julian Assange edited by Tariq Ali and Margaret Kunstler.
Read the full review here.
An excerpt of Hate Inc. in A Public Seminar
Commercial media has always been sensationalistic. We were never not encouraged to aim content at your outrage center. We were always eyeball-hunting.
I know this because I was hired to do this work, over and over. My commercial niche, in fact, was the vitriolic essay that got people spitting mad, or poked fun at someone audiences hated.
I was the Triumph the Insult Comic Dog of journalism. I actually won the National Magazine Award for commentary, the highest award you can get in the magazine business, for a Rolling Stone article about Mike Huckabee called “My Favorite Nut Job” that called the Arkansas governor a “Christian goofball of the highest order” who resembled an “oversized Muppet.” There is and was great demand in the business for “takedown artists,” provided you’re taking down the right people.
Read the full excerpt here.
October 2019 Reads for the Rest of Us
Written by Mexican American activist Natascha Elena Uhlmann, this book is exactly what the title implies: an impassioned call to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). We’ve all heard about the horrific conditions of border camps and detention centers but, Uhlmann argues, improving these conditions is not enough and ICE must be abolished to make long-lasting change for immigrants to the U.S.
An innovative approach to ‘abolish ICE’
For weeks, organizers with Never Again Action, a Jewish-led advocacy group, have gathered outside of ICE offices across the country. Singing protest songs, they implore ICE officers put a stop to the agency’s abusive detention and deportation practices. “Quit your job!” is a common plea.
Some may just take them up on it.
This week, Never Again Atlanta, one of the group’s many local chapters, launched a job placement program for immigration officers seeking to distance themselves from the agency. The program seeks to make leaving the agency a real possibility by matching conscientious objectors with career advisers and job opportunities. “As we looked into these agents’ eyes, we could tell they weren’t comfortable with what was going on. We’ve asked them to quit their jobs, so how can we make it easy on them?” Emily Baselt, an organizer with Never Again Atlanta, told The Week.
Read the full article here.
Alissa Quart talks with us about the “dark poetry” of American politics
Through her work as both a writer and the executive editor of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, Quart is all about clueing people into what she calls the “dark poetry around them.” Thoughts and Prayers is no exception, dexterously speaking to the calamity and melodrama of our current political climate using the hybrid form of reported poetry. “I see this as a meta-text, a text around the journalism,” says Quart, a prolific journalist who has also written several nonfiction books on topics such as consumer culture and middle class precarity. “Sometimes journalism gets locked into the literal truth,” she says. “Potentially, a form like poetry or other kinds of more explosive, disruptive forms of culture could be telling the emotional truth of our period, especially the Trump era.”
Read the full interview here.
The New York Times features Matt Taibbi’s Hate Inc. in their new and noteworthy books column
HATE INC.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another, by Matt Taibbi. (OR Books, $24.95.) In a smart and scathing freewheeling analysis, the Rolling Stone journalist analyzes political campaign coverage and other media powder kegs.
Read the full column here.
Matt Taibbi: There is no such thing as unbiased media
Journalist Matt Taibbi describes his latest book and how it relates to the developing impeachment scandal.
Watch the full clip here.
On the anniversary of the Las Vegas mass shooting, Alissa Quart shares a poem about gun violence.
The U.S. is a country plagued by gun violence. Its shadow looms everywhere — over school hallways, movie theaters, concert venues and homes. On this day two years ago, a mass shooting at a Las Vegas country music festival saw 59 killed and 527 injured. The statistics are sobering; the causes, well documented. But these horrific acts of violence are often met with the same empty words from political leaders, who offer “thoughts and prayers” but so little in the way of tangible solutions.
Author Alissa Quart’s book of poetry, Thoughts and Prayers, explores the darkness and numbness that is such a part of our current political existence.
As Quart told Teen Vogue, “The title poem is composed of the public language around mourning over school shootings in the U.S. or from political leaders and Web sites. I also sifted through the language that politicians of both parties tweet, what kids themselves said about mass shootings, and the words companies use in fabricating souvenirs that commodify mass killings.”
Read the full poem here.
Manufacturing Dissent
The collapse of Russiagate, which left Rachel Maddow nearly in tears, also caught the New York Times “a little tiny bit flat-footed,” as executive editor Dean Baquet confessed in August. “The day Bob Mueller walked off that witness stand, our readers who want Donald Trump to go away suddenly thought, ‘Holy shit, Bob Mueller is not going to do it.’ …We built our newsroom to cover one story… Now we have to regroup, and shift resources and emphasis to take on a different story.
Read the full review here here.
An extract from Luke O’Neil’s Welcome To Hellworld
There’s a girl I never want to let myself forget. Her name is Samar Hassan and we killed her family.
In January of 2005 in the northern Iraqi town of Tal Afar, Samar who was five years old at the time was riding in the backseat of her parents’ car as they returned from bringing her young brother to the hospital. It was getting dark and nearing curfew and her father likely aware of this was driving faster than normal. Fearing that the driver was a suicide bomber an army patrol in the area that evening was given permission to open fire and so they did because that is what army patrols do.
Read the full extract here.
An extract from Luke O’Neil’s Welcome To Hellworld
Jackie Crow lost one hundred pounds and she’s very proud of that fact and why wouldn’t she be that’s almost an entire adult human being that she doesn’t need to carry around with her anymore. If you lived for years with a one-hundred-pound person riding around on your back and then one day they got off like ok I’m done with the piggyback ride now you’d be elated. Imagine how much more lightly you could step.
Read the full extract here.
David Berman of Silver Jews Remembered
The lead singer of the indie rock band Silver Jews, David Berman, died last month at fifty-two, a suicide in Brooklyn. While he might at first glance appear just another icon of Gen X, an embarrassing phrase back in the day that now it seems accurate, Berman reflected that generation’s ironic, dark hunches about existence. As he put it in one song:
What if life is just some hard equation
On a chalkboard in a science class for ghosts?
You can live again,
But you’ll have to die twice in the end.The Silver Jews’ most renowned albums, The Natural Bridge and American Water, were made during the 1990s, a decade where the shrug was a key artistic gesture, albeit an ominous shrug.
Read the full piece here.
Let’s push the language of journalism past its limits
TWO YEARS INTO Donald Trump’s presidency, journalists and pundits seem hard-pressed for new, effective ways to describe each fresh outrage. That may be because we’ve reached the limits of journalism’s typical lingo and genres—of the blaring 24-hour news cycle, in which news outlets endlessly refresh their coverage of a worsening incident, framed by “BREAKING NEWS” chyrons that repeat our president’s racist Twitter commentary.
Read the full essay here here.
‘Late Capitalism,’ a Prose Poem by Alissa Quart From Her New Collection, Thoughts and Prayers
Late Capitalism
A gloss and a hair mask.
Meet the shareholders?
Not at these shareholder meetings.The best headlines have internal tension.
Read the full excerpt here.
What is there to salvage in an agency that exists solely to hunt, catalogue and detain the most vulnerable among us? Ice’s violence is as systematic as it is cruel
This summer, a coalition of award-winning authors came together with a plea to Congress: they called for an end to the inhumane conditions in detention centers, where women are forced to drink out of toilets and children go without food, water or medical care.
The writers, immigrants and refugees themselves, know just what is at stake: “Many of us came to the US as children and shudder to think how this country would treat us now,” they write. They urge Congress to mitigate the worst abuses of our immigration system, from unsafe conditions – in detention or third countries – to endless backlogs and convoluted legal processes.
Read the full excerpt here.
An interview with Luke O’Neil in Boston Magazine
I worry about Luke O’Neil sometimes. Possibly more than any of the writers covering the million horrible things in the world right now—innocent children who become casualties of war, desperate people resorting to GoFundMe campaigns to pay for healthcare—he has a way of internalizing the sorrows of the news cycle, presenting its most troubling themes alongside his own struggles and weaving it all into a grand narrative about decay and despair. Reading his popular, semi-weekly newsletter Hell World is a lot like staring deep into O’Neil’s soul, and it’s often a pretty dark place.
Read the full interview here.
Former Christian broadcaster Terry Heaton on how “The 700 Club” pushed the Republican Party toward Donald Trump
Last week Donald Trump shared a message on Twitter from a racist conspiracy theorist proclaiming that he, the president, was viewed by Jewish people as the “Second Coming of God” and the “King of Israel.”
The mytho-religious aspects of this “endorsement” likely have no meaning for Donald Trump. Such claims matter to Trump primarily because they stroke his megalomania. Trump the malignant narcissist authoritarian and fascist seeks out praise from wherever it may come. As such, Donald Trump frequently praises himself in the grandest and most absurd terms possible: for example, Trump’s looking to the sky last week as if looking for a sign from God and then telling journalists and the world that he is in fact the “chosen one.”
Read the full interview here.
