Matt Taibbi talks about the rise of Putin, Russia-gate, and Rachel Maddow and Russophobia in the U.S. He joins Paul Jay for part two of Reality Asserts Itself on theAnalysis.news

Transcript

Paul Jay

Hi, I'm Paul Jay. Welcome to theAnalysis.news. I'll be back in a second with part two of my Reality Asserts Itself with Matt Taibbi, and please don't forget the donate button.

Hi, welcome to Part two of Reality Asserts Itself with Matt Taibbi. Matt's the author of four New York Times bestsellers, an award-winning columnist for Rolling Stone, his reporting and commentary on TK News is among the top five for numbers of subscribers on Substack, and sometimes I think he's at the top of Substack. His podcasts, Useful Idiots, cohosted with Katie Halper, is wildly popular. Thanks for joining us, Matt.

Matt Taibbi

Hi, Paul.

Paul Jay

Let's keep the history going for a bit. What year do you leave?

Matt Taibbi

I left in 2002.

Paul Jay

Oh, you're there all through the rise of Putin.

Matt Taibbi

Oh, yeah. And I was close friends with well, I was friends with a lot of the reporters who were really initially quite negative about Putin. The Russians, we had no illusions about what he was early. Interestingly, a lot of the Western reporters did. If you look back, you'll see that there were a lot of stories about how being in the KGB wasn't necessarily a bad thing, that it was just a profession that upper-middle-class people went into in the 70s in the Soviet Union. He was a refined, cultured, educated person, a man with whom we could do business, but we knew right away that he was going to be a step in a different direction and we did a lot of reporting on that.

Paul Jay

Hmm. Well, that's interesting because the interviews I've done with people in today's Russia who are very critical of Putin but also see his rise as something that was frankly necessary. That the chaos of the 90s, there had to be somebody that can construct a viable state.

Matt Taibbi

Oh, absolutely, yeah, and he was absolutely a reaction against what was happening. So, Yeltsin was essentially a puppet of Western-backed interests. He posed as a Russian populist and a man of the people. He had this sort of everyman quality that some Russians thought was very attractive. He drank a lot, but really, he was there to be sort of a typical front person for neoliberal politics. That wasn't working for Russia. The country was really going downhill and Putin, I think in many respects he wasn't better, but he at least kept the stolen money in the country, and Russians viewed him as something, they would say like, yeah, he's corrupt, but he's 'nash' right, in Russian that means 'he's ours'. So there was a sense that the Russians were getting their own autonomy, even if it was becoming more repressive. So, yeah, I totally understand that point of view, and there was a little bit more prosperity too when he came along.

Paul Jay

So, you know, in the course of this, we'll jump back and forth from the present to back then. What do you make of this demonization of Putin now? He's as close to the foreign devil as you can get in American politics.

Matt Taibbi

It's so funny because he's gone back and forth between being the symbol of absolute evil and somebody we...