April 2: The Foolproof Guide to Becoming a Serial Sex Pest

Happy Liberation Day; Dems win in Wisconsin; Goodbye, Elon?

---

---

The Big Story

If you’re reading The Scroll, you’ve probably heard of the journalist Matt Taibbi. Hell, you might have gone through an ideological journey similar to Taibbi’s over the past decade. Between 2016 and the present, Taibbi—formerly a left-wing campaign reporter for Rolling Stone, now the editor of the “Racket” Substack—broke more and more openly against the Democratic Party over a series of scandals that have also been of great interest to The Scroll and Tablet.

Taibbi was, right after Tablet’s Lee Smith, early in recognizing Russiagate as a scam and an op, and he later became a leading reporter, along with Tablet’s Jacob Siegel, on what has come to be known as the “Counter-Disinformation Complex” or the “Censorship Industrial Complex”—i.e., the “whole-of-society” effort to censor the internet, which began following the 2016 election and was accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic. He was, by dint of those efforts, one of the journalists granted access to the Twitter Files following Elon Musk’s purchase of the platform; he helped to expose the full scale of the pressure that the Biden administration brought to bear on the social media giants to encourage them to censor, demonetize, and downrank whatever information—true and false—the government deemed mis- or disinformation. That reporting, in turn, is why Republicans called Taibbi to testify yesterday in a congressional hearing on the Censorship Industrial Complex.

Enter Sydney Kamlager-Dove, a Democratic Representative from California:

For those who didn’t watch the clip, here’s a partial transcript (emphasis ours):

The majority is relitigating a made-up conspiracy theory about a part of the State Department that no longer exists [i.e., the Global Engagement Center, which shuttered in December] to distract from the dumpster-fire foreign policy this administration is pursuing, and elevating a serial sexual harasser as its star witness in the process. Mr. Chair, I request unanimous consent to enter into the record two articles about the Republican witness, Matt Taibbi. The first is a Chicago Reader article entitled [sic] “20 Years Ago in Moscow, Matt Taibbi Was a Misogynist A-hole—and Possibly Worse.” [The second is] a Washington Post article titled, “The Two Expat Bros Who Terrorized Women Correspondents in Moscow.”

A “serial sexual harasser”? Sounds bad. But what does it mean? Sexual harassment, strictly speaking, is a vague term from employment law, and Taibbi has never been formally accused of that, nor of any related crime, such as sexual assault, ever, anywhere, in any venue, civil or criminal, as far as we are aware. But “Kamlager-Dove is immune to prosecution for defamation because she was speaking from the House floor, which is lucky for her, I guess,”as Douglas Lain of Sublation Media observed in the replies to an X post sharing the above clip.

Judging by the articles adduced as evidence, however, serial sexual harasser in this case means Taibbi was an asshole to women in the 1990s, when he was living in Moscow, addicted to heroin, and running a gonzo expatriate magazine called The eXile, in which he and cofounder Mark Ames mythologized their own partying and womanizing in between occasional bouts of reporting. Although Taibbi and Ames’ exploits (i.e., asking their Russian office assistants for blowjobs) were controversial at the time, they did not prevent Taibbi from becoming a muckraking hero of the American left upon his return to the United States. He earned a gig as a political columnist for Rolling Stone, for which he won a National Magazine Award, and made regular appearances on MSNBC, particularly related to his financial reporting, which made him an early darling of Occupy Wall Street and what would become the Bernie Sanders left. By the time #MeToo broke out in 2017, however, Taibbi had already begun to raise questions in Rolling Stone about the Russian collusion story, and his legacy was due for a reassessment. Thus the two articles cited by Kamlager-Dove, which merely resurfaced material about Taibbi that had already been public for nearly two decades.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how a crusading journalist with a sexist streak becomes a “serial sexual harasser.” It’s the circle of life.

---

The Rest

→Happy “Liberation Day!” Trump scheduled today’s tariff announcements for 4 PM, right around the time The Scroll closes, so we’ll have to wait until tomorrow’s edition to give you a full rundown of what’s been announced. As of our writing, however, the president had announced that he will be signing an executive order imposing the long-awaited “reciprocal tariffs,” and that these would include 25% tariffs on all foreign-made automobiles, effective at midnight. So if you were thinking about buying a Toyota to mount a .50 cal, go ahead and pull the trigger tonight.

→Republicans won two Florida special elections on Tuesday, preserving their narrow House majority, but lost a highly publicized state Supreme Court election in Wisconsin that Elon Musk had billed as a contest over “the entire destiny of humanity.” The results are being interpreted as a rebuke of Trump and Musk; however, it’s difficult to draw conclusions about off-year special elections, which tend to have much lower turnout than presidential or even midterm elections and privilege a Democratic electorate that is now more educated and politically engaged than its Republican counterpart. Still, Musk poured at least $25 million into the Wisconsin Supreme Court race—making it by far the most expensive state judicial race in history—only for the Republican candidate to lose by 10% in a state that Trump narrowly won in November. That may suggest some voters are sick of the administration, but it may also be further confirmation of something that’s been true for nearly a decade: American voters like Trump. Generic Republicans? Not so much.

→Politico Magazine reports that Trump is telling members of his “inner circle” that Musk will be “stepping back” from the administration following the expiration of his special government employee status, which is capped at 130 days. According to “three Trump insiders,” “both men” have decided that it would be best for Musk to “return to his businesses” while staying on as an “informal adviser.” According to the report, the decision was prompted in part by fears that Musk was becoming a political liability and by White House frustrations with the billionaire’s “issues” with operating through the White House chain of command and “unexpected and off-message comments on X.” But as one source added, “Anyone who thinks Musk is going to disappear entirely from Trump’s orbit is ‘fooling themselves.’”

→In our Post of the Day, Amit Segal covers the IDF operation in southern Gaza that started last night:

→The Trump administration is “seriously considering an Iranian proposal for indirect nuclear talks” mediated through Oman, two “U.S. officials” have told Axios. According to the officials, the White House is “still engaged in an internal debate” between those who favor a deal with Iran and “those who see talks as a waste of time,” and the administration is now “exploring next steps in order to begin conversations and trust building with the Iranians.” On that “internal debate,” we’d note there is now an aggressive campaign of leaking from within the administration targeting National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, an Iran hawk—which is interesting, since Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, reportedly responsible for “leak-proofing” the administration, is also reportedly a member of the White House faction that has tangled with Waltz in Iran discussions. We’d also note, as Phillip Smyth emphasized in yesterday’s Big Story, that the Iranians, despite holding an extraordinarily weak hand, are effectively offering the White House nothing: no direct talks, no negotiation over ballistic missiles or the regime’s support for its regional proxies, and nuclear negotiation only within the framework of the 2015 nuclear deal. Which sounds like a waste of time to us.

→In fact, the White House’s early taboo on leaks seems to be crumbling, judging by a Wednesday article in the New York Post, in which sources derided Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick as a “loose cannon with half-baked ideas that he just randomly spews on live television.” Lutnick, according to the report, has angered colleagues with recent comments suggesting that a tariff-induced recession would be “worth it” and urging Fox News viewers to buy Tesla stock, which has slid about 40% in 2025. Lutnick is known to be a strong internal advocate of Trump’s aggressive tariff policies and to be opposed by those in the administration who favor a more orthodox economic approach. Despite the carping from “sources,” however, Trump still, as of early March, trusted his “old friend” Lutnick and was privately praising his television appearances, per a report in The Wall Street Journal.

→Are alleged Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang members entitled to due process protections from deportation? Judging by the government’s initial claims and media comments from administration officials, the White House’s answer is no. In its initial March deportation of hundreds of alleged TdA members, the Trump administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act to summarily deport hundreds of migrants to El Salvador without going through the normal immigration court process through which deportees can file an appeal. In a document intended for deportees, the government informed them that they were “not entitled to a hearing, appeal, or judicial review” of their removal, and White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller and other officials have variously claimed that the deportations are “nonjusticiable,” as they relate to the president’s core authorities under Article II of the Constitution. But, as Jason Willick notes in The Washington Post, that is not what the administration argued in a Friday brief to the Supreme Court. There, the White House’s lawyers claimed that the deportees can ask for judicial review—by filing a habeas corpus petition in the state where they are being held. As Willick writes, “Put differently, the Trump administration—caught circumventing the normal immigration laws to deport people without a chance for a hearing—is telling the courts that due process was available to the deportees all along.”

Read the rest here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/04/02/trump-supreme-court-immigration-venezuelans/

→Rule No. 1 of journalism: Sit on your big scoop until nobody cares anymore:

Next they’ll be telling us Kamala Harris didn’t work at McDonald’s.

---

SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

---