Wednesday, October 25, 2006
 According to Scripps-Howard news service, only 16 percent of Americans believe the official government conspiracy fairytale. This hardcore flat-earth crowd is apparently becoming increasingly unhinged. One example is the Rolling Stone typist Matt Taibbi. Taibbi (pictured right) had spewed an ignorant and venomous screed re: 9/11 on to the internets and decided to follow-up by meeting with some top NYC 9/11 researchers at a Manhattan diner.
The following is an account of that meeting posted to 911blogger.com: "I was at the meeting in the diner.
Up until today I couldn't figure out why Taibbi supposedly wanted to talk with us. If it had been me, and I had the feelings and thoughts about us he had expressed in his first article, I would've just blown us off - walked by and chuckled to myself. Well, he was a writer and just wanted more material to slam us with further - so he pretended he wanted to "talk about it" with us. Typical "journalist." Anything for a cheap laugh.
And he wanted so much for us to know that he was a real journalist - had worked overseas on controversial stories and wasn't just a flak or mouthpiece. Why would he care what we think? If he's really doing his job and after slamming us like he did?
I guess with this article fullfills the need for some follow-up, since his first one was in-your-face dross. This one is supposed to be more subtantial. But it's only a more subtle attempt and untimately just as transparent.
At first I felt sorry for him. Others, not just Nico, were giving him a hard time. But after I slept on it that night I realized that he actually deserved it because of the false analysis he had spread about 9/11, with his snide and arrogant attitude - and hypocrisy (which he accuses us of), as he doesn’t show contempt in person but only on paper.
I thought Haupt was right to provoke him. Taibbi was the one who wanted to hit Nico in the face. He didn't like what Nico was saying. And couldn't really answer him. Not because he didn't have the time, he was given time to talk. But because he had done very little research actually on the 9/11 events, and so really couldn't answer. The first article, apparently, was just blown out of his mouth.
Taibbi went outside first, challenging Haupt. Nico tried to go outside (after thinking a bit, since he is quite slight!), but the owner stopped it. And I remember Taibbi's face looking through the glass at us, like he was trying to intimate Nico was a coward. Glaring through the glass and saying with his look, "Come out here."
Nico had really gotten to him. It's sad because the only way Taibbi can get back now is to write more fake debunking pieces - that don't actually debunk anything, and try to smear us further - a quixotic task.
He also misrepresented me and my point of view about the Media. But what can you expect? He's just dishonest.
Now why is he dishonest? Are there subconscious factors at work which cause him to really believe he is righteous in his tarring and feathering of our group, or is he actually in bad faith?
I think both.
He has a political ax to grind - he admitted he was angry with our movement since we distracted from real politics - the stuff that really matters - hating and defeating Bush. And I think he'll be dishonest. either with himself or with his audience. to further that agenda. The irony is that our movement has the greatest chance to defeat Bush and all he stands for.
The main reason he *must* prove us wrong is because he believes it's impossible. He believes it's impossible, because he trusts mainstream news sources. (I believe his father works for a major network.) He tries to make us look silly, since that is a reflex. His mind is made up before he even examines the evidence - since he thinks he knows we must be wrong. He tries to find flaws in our arguments, and when that proves more difficult than imagined and our numbers are greater than he could predict, he ramps up the disdain and anger.
He tried to inform us that if we didn't have all the details of how our story worked out, if we couldn't supply him with the complete provable narrative, then we couldn't be taken seriously. He really looked surprised when that contention was not accepted. He takes that as axiomatic: The government can just state facts and those will be taken on faith. But anyone who questions those facts and statements must know every little detail of the operation or else be dismissed. This is a double standard and an hypocrisy which was so ingrained in the man that he was astounded anyone could question it.
I suppose he learned this or picked this up from other information authorities, or just made it up. But he really became discomfited when told that, as a matter of fact, we are not in a position to have all the details of exactly how 9/11 was carried out. In fact we can't. But we *can* nevertheless, show that the Government's tale should not be accepted. And we are also allowed to connect the dots and demonstrate who are the prime suspects.
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The apparently thuggish self-proclaimed "gatekeeper" Taibbi posted his account to RollingStone.com 10/24/06: A group of Truthers even picketed my office, and I'm still picking food particles out of my scarf after an incident in which the movement's house lunatic, a wild-eyed German blogger named Nico Haupt, tried to goad me into slugging him in a West Side diner.
"Go ahead, heet me, then I haf beeg story!" he roared, scream-spitting half-digested detritus in my face.
Of course I didn't hit him -- nothing in the world is more ridiculous than two writers fighting in a restaurant. If you're surprised that I would call someone who spit food on my lap a fellow writer, don't be. As I subsequently found out, Haupt is a literary juggernaut, one of the most voluble bloggers on the planet earth. His internet entries read like a MySpace mixture of MTV's Real World meets Che's Congo Diaries, only on meth and in a German accent.
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.....| Posted at 23:56 | PERMA-LINK |
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