Hate Inc.: Why Today's Media Makes Us Despise One Another

by Matt Taibbi

You’d trust the average newspaper editorialist to be able to assemble an IKEA product, but not much beyond that. If we were smarter, we’d be in another business, removing brain tumors, designing wind turbines, etc. Even the age of the intellectual poseur is vanishing. There are no more William Safires or Bill Buckleys who make sure to remind you every few weeks or so they like to read The Iliad and listen to Bach and expect you to know that Hilaire Belloc walked from Paris to Rome. The last of this breed is probably George Will of the Washington Post, who writes about baseball to convince intellectuals he’s ordinary and writes about Byron to convince ordinary people he’s intellectual. Will was once the patron saint of conservatives who felt a need to rationalize meanness as smartness. When Trump successfully ridiculed such people as phonies, Will lost his demographic niche. Now he has been forced to try to rebrand himself as a kind of Democrat, using the same goofball Dennis Miller-isms he once used as a GOP attack dog, only in reverse (Trump, he wrote more recently, is a “Vesuvius of mendacities”).