Malcolm Gladwell recently made news by expressing shame and regret over his previously stated defense of male “trans” athletes in women’s sports. Matt Taibbi commented harshly in the Racket News post “Malcolm Gladwell conquers Mt. Suck” (behind the Racket News paywall). Taibbi’s commentary is now accessible via the video below.
Taibbi’s commentary reminds his audience of the December 2022 debate pitting Taibbi and Douglas Murray against Gladwell and Michelle Goldberg on the proposition “Be it resolved, don’t trust mainstream media.” Taibbi and Murray took the affirmative, i.e., the mainstream media are not to be trusted. The event took place under the auspices of the Munk Debates in Toronto, Canada. Before undertaking his dive into the Twitter Files, Taibbi wrote it up here at his Substack site for his subscribers. He proudly noted the lopsided nature of his and Murray’s victory in the tweet below.
Mainstream Media Slain in Canada:
In a wild and oddly nasty standoff, author Douglas Murray and I steamrolled Malcolm Gladwell and Michelle Goldberg in the most decisive win in the history of Canada’s Munk debateshttps://t.co/3jgSZ11csM— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 2, 2022
National Review’s Ari Bluff reported on the debate in an accessible story here. As he noted, “Taibbi and Murray won by the largest margin ever recorded at a Munk Debate.”
The debate remains as timely as ever and can be viewed on YouTube here in its entirety. I watched it at the time and found it incredibly entertaining. The pace of the debate was swift. Gladwell proved himself a sanctimonious nitwit whose strong point is condescension. He played the same stupid race card several times on Taibbi — because Taibbi praised Walter Cronkite in his opening statement. Gladwell could not be bothered to pronounce Taibbi’s name correctly either. It was somehow beneath him.
By the same token, Gladwell also persisted in calling Murray “Doug.” Murray returned the favor in his closing argument: “Well, Malc.” Murray referred at one point to Gladwell as “glib,” and that aptly characterized the nature of Gladwell’s remarks in toto. Murray showed how it was to be done with style in his second rebuttal (I think): “It’s so strange hearing you debate, Malcolm, because you listen to nothing your opponents say.” At least there was no false bonhomie.
Murray was magnificent throughout. The clip below comes from his opening statement.
WOW!🔥 You will NEVER hear a more eloquent takedown of Canadian legacy media than this. pic.twitter.com/EVWdrnlewu
— Canada Proud (@WeAreCanProud) December 1, 2022
I would love to have responded to Gladwell’s testimonial to the New Yorker’s legendary fact-checking (by means of an interruption deep into the debate). The New Yorker’s fact-checking did not make a dent in Jane Mayer’s 15,000-word profile of Christopher Steele, for example, and yet the profile got essentially everything relevant wrong. (I wrote about it at length in a series of five posts that I called “The Dossiad.”)
