Matt Taibbi
Taibbi takes a mildly amusing look at fringe movements on opposing sides of the political spectrum by going undercover as a true believer within the 9/11 truth movement and various Christian evangelical retreats and meetings. His anecdotes offer a dry wit and caustic sarcasm that could only come from his intimate, long-form involvement with the movements. His peers in the various groups have no idea he is a clandestine journalist, allowing them to show their true faces with all the absurdity and self-deluded fantasies that serve as a prerequisite for membership in such counter-culture causes.
The Rolling Stones editor fails however to make an argument for why we should even care about these fringe movements beyond the humorous, broad farce of the matter. His contrived (very hypothetical) hypothesis that increasingly corrupted political institutions and media outlets are leading Americans to seek refuge in these movements falls flat with a lack of any data at all.
Even more awkwardly-forced is Taibbi’s section about his time as an embedded reporter in Iraq. He haphazardly uses a complex and vague metaphor of some guarded wall just to shoehorn this random section in to his central argument. I speculate that he just needed to fill an extra thirty pages and felt he could substantiate his war reporting credentials, even though he admits he didn’t see anything like the front-line offensives that would have made for a grim biography of war.
Overall, Taibbi is a colorful, animated and enjoyable writer, but ‘The Great Derangement’ probably would have served more effectively as a shortened ten page Rolling Stone feature article.