Matthew Yglesias Is The Banality of Evil

As Gaza burned, Yglesias yawned, saying Biden couldn't stop the bloodbath. The ceasefire deal announced yesterday, which Trump forced on Netanyahu, showed he just didn't care.

Yglesias in his native habitat, the Washington cocktail party circuit. Photo via Wikimedia Commons/Public domain.

As I reported in a story published yesterday, the Biden administration played no significant role in the negotiations that led to the ceasefire agreement that was approved today by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Security Cabinet and signed by Israel and Hamas. The agreement was imposed on Netanyahu by President-elect Trump and his Middle East Envoy Steve Witkoff.

Trump’s success in forcing Israel to accept the deal confirmed what had been evident for a long time: President Biden could have brought about the same result had he exerted real pressure on Netanyahu rather than being a doormat the Israeli leader treated with contempt. It also exposed that the White House’s explanation for why it hadn’t been able to negotiate a ceasefire before Trump stepped in – the US government simply didn’t have the necessary leverage to force Netanyahu to sign a deal he didn’t want to – was empty, self-serving PR to justify Biden’s failure. That had long been obvious as well as the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) would not have been able to obliterate Gaza and kill approximately 46,000 Palestinians, almost all civilians, without the vast quantities of US weapons Biden was kind enough to express ship them almost every time Netanyahu asked.

Government officials lie all the time, so that’s not exactly a surprise, though it’s a more serious matter when the lies serve to obscure a presidential administration's complicity in a campaign of ethnic cleansing and war crimes, which was Biden’s motive. Still, there are others in Washington who the cease fire exposed as moral and intellectual frauds, and arguably even more compromised than Biden and Anthony Blinken, his vile secretary of state.

High on that list are the journalists who served as apologists for the White House by faithfully regurgitating its transparently false talking points. In doing so, they made themselves accomplices in Israel Defense Forces’s wholesale murder of Palestinian civilians. No one in the Washington media world emerges more tainted than Matthew Yglesias, author of Slow Boring, one of the most popular political publications on Substack with almost 170,000 subscribers, Bloomberg columnist, and senior fellow at the Niskanen Center.

Not that Yglesias had a stellar reputation before, other than among his equally bland fellow conventional wisdom purveyors in Washington’s media establishment, and within the moderate pro-business wing of the Democratic Party, which has controlled it since 1992 when Bill Clinton was elected. Yglesias has close ties to the Democratic elite, and worked for three years at the Center for American Progress – the think tank founded by John Podesta, who was President Barack Obama’s counselor and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign chairman – as a writer for its blog, ThinkProgress.

In the 14 years that have passed since he left the think tank he has become a beloved figure among top Democrats. Ron Klain, President Biden’s White House chief of staff at the time, told the Washington Post in 2023 he had “liked and shared multiple Yglesias tweets, usually ones that praise White House actions in defiance of wailing liberals or henpecking conservatives,” and that his work circulated in the White House. The story also reported that Janet Yellen, Biden’s treasury secretary, reached out to Yglesias to share her opinions with him, and soon afterwards he wrote a piece saying the administration’s economic policies were “going in the right direction.”

Yglesias likes to think of himself as a stolid liberal intellectual, political progressive, and all around nice guy, and he’s capable of righteous anger, at least if it’s directed at his enemies. Donald Trump is a total piece of shit and scumbag,” he proclaimed in a 2023 story. It’s hard to imagine Yglesias expressing similar outrage about a Democratic president, and it would be awkward to do so if he were so inclined because, after all, what would his friends in the White House think?

That’s not necessarily the reason he’s served as a mouthpiece for the Biden administration’s blanket support for Israel’s military assault on Gaza, and in fact I don’t think it is. That’s more a reflection of his own tepid brand of Clintonian liberalism and ingrained rejection of dangerous opinions much further to the left, especially on a controversial issue where he’d have to take a stand against the Washington political consensus and potentially ruffle feathers in his political and journalism circles.

In an article he wrote for Slow Boring last year about his thinking on Gaza, Yglesias said his opinions were shaped by his review of the political establishment’s view of things. Biden was “staking out pro-Israel positions” and his “stances had near-uniform bipartisan support in congress,” he explained. “Not absolutely unanimous, but “the Squad” is a very small group of people who got a lot of attention at that moment while representing less than two percent of the membership.”

Whatever accounts for his abysmal reporting on the Gaza, it’s been a model of journalism cowardice, as Yglesias waddles here and there trying to sound like he’s deeply concerned about the plight of Palestinian civilians, while in the next breath completely exonerating the Biden administration and Netanyahu’s government by saying Hamas is responsible. As is frequently the case, Yglesias has no idea of what he’s talking about so his arguments are uninformed by any serious research and he sounds like the chief of the IDF’s propaganda unit.

Hence, Yglesias has written stories that say the “humanitarian toll of Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip...naturally gives most people pause,” and furthermore the “situation is worrying — it would be inhumane to find it otherwise — and obviously Israel should follow the laws of war,” and even more gravely, “the pictures coming out of the war zone are striking in ways that tear at the heartstrings.”

Nevertheless, despite the fact that he cries himself to sleep at night over the unfortunate plight of Palestinian civilians, “I do think, though a lot of critics overlook the extent to which this humanitarian disaster is an inevitable consequence of waging war in a place with the population density of Philadelphia or Chicago.” Another reason why the whole thing is terribly complicated, he has said, is that while it’s all “incredibly sad,” Palestinians have supported Hamas, so it’s kind of their fault the Israel has to kill so many of them, and Hamas lives among the Palestinians so the fix of the death and destruction that’s taken places says more about the irresponsibility of Hamas than about the irresponsibility of the IDF.”

It certainly is a genuine dilemma for poor Yglesias. On the one hand, he could be a tiny bit less squeamish about criticizing the Biden administration for giving Netanyahu carte blanche on his military strategy in Gaza, which many scholars and human rights groups have concluded is a campaign of genocide. On the other hand, if he goes too far out on a limb, he might annoy the White House and administration officials wouldn’t chuckle at his tweets anymore. I mean come on, you can’t expect a guy to take a risk like that when the stakes are so high.

Matthew Yglesias, the man who took lemons — the deaths of more than 1,000 poor apparel workers — and made lemonade. Photo via Wikimedia Commons/Public domain.

Yglesias grew up in New York and attended the Dalton School, where the current tuition is $65,000 per year and the alma mater includes none other than Anthony Blinken – and went to college at Harvard, graduating in 2003 with a BA magna cum laude in philosophy. He moved to Washington that year and went to work as a writing fellow with the American Prospect, and from there climbed his way to the job with stops along the way at The Atlantic, Slate, and Vox, which he co-found with Ezra Klein, among other media outlets.

Yglesias’s recipe for success was building a brand as a liberal journalist, but not so liberal that he’d regularly budge far from the center of Democratic orthodoxy. It wasn’t a phony ideological shift of opinion because Yglesias was never all that liberal to begin with; as a 21-year-old at Harvard he supported the 2003 US invasion of Iraq.

However, part of his brand-building was a shtick. Jeff Hauser, executive director of the Revolving Door Project, a progressive watchdog group that tracks corporate influence in politics and critic of Yglesias, summarized it succinctly.

Yglesias created an image around his pre-existing political inclinations as a moderate Democrat, but he knew better than most that attracting attention is a good strategy to promote yourself. He’s a natural troll who likes to be perceived as a contrarian who’ll criticize his own side, so to be contrarian he punched to the left. But in doing that, he dramatically overstated the actual power of the left so he’d look like a courageous underdog even though his target was far weaker than the side he was on.

The Revolving Door Project collected a few of Ygelesias’s “contrarian” takes on labor issues here, though they’re not exactly contrarian unless you define that to mean finding a sunny side to the deadliest industrial accident in history, which resulted in the deaths of more than 1,000 Bangladeshi apparel workers making an average of $28 per month, as he famously did in a story he wrote for Slate on April 24, 2013.

The story ran the same day that an eight-story commercial building in Dhaka collapsed. Five apparel factories operated from the building, which collapsed because the management had ignored repeated safety warnings. Nevertheless, Yglesias spotted a positive side to the tragedy that everyone else had missed – for a very good reason.

His take in Slate, titled “Different Places Have Different Safety Rules, And That’s OK,” was that these types of events were bound to happen now and then in our crazy global world. As he put it:

Bangladesh is a lot poorer than the United States, and there are very good reasons for Bangladeshi people to make different choices in this regard to Americans. That’s true whether you’re talking about an individual calculus or a collective calculus. Safety rules that are appropriate for the United States would be unnecessarily immiserating in much poorer Bangladesh.

Just to make sure everyone got the central point he was making, Yglesias handily summarized it: “Foreign factories should be more dangerous than American factories.”

But the strategy worked. Years earlier, Andrew Sullivan established the “Yglesias Award” to honor "writers, politicians, columnists or pundits who actually criticize their own side, make enemies among political allies, and generally risk something for the sake of saying what they believe.”

Yglesias’s work has been characterized in a variety of different ways. A 2011 story in the New York Times described him as “a formerly bored Harvard kid who hated reporting” and became an Internet star.” VICE opted for "neoliberal shill" two years ago. The headline above the Post’s 2023 story about Yglesias was, “The boring journey of Matt Yglesias; The Washington ur-blogger’s slightly contrarian, mildly annoying, somewhat influential, very lucrative path toward the political center.”

The person who best captured Yglesias’s core essence was Yglesias himself, in a Slow Boring story published in March of 2024 about Israel and Gaza. “I’m not saying anything about this that Thomas Friedman hasn’t said in a dozen columns dispensing friendly advice to the Israeli politic and Israeli political leaders,” he wrote in characterizing his general opinions on the issue. Maybe it’s just me, but a combination of the ideas of Friedman – the walking, talking weathervane of convention wisdom and globalization cheerleader who’s an adored figured among the downtrodden masses at Davos – and offering friendly advice to the Israeli government – that’s led by a man who at the time Yglesias wrote the story was under investigation by the International Criminal Court, which issued an arrest warrant for him later last year for “responsibility for the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts” – doesn’t strike me as a model of independent, contrarian journalism.

In fact, it was the same blueprint Yglesias invariably uses when reporting and leads to stories that invariably present a distilled version of the consensus opinion in Washington in its purest form. In the case of Israel and Gaza, the distilled version of the Washington consensus is almost identical to Natanyahu’s propaganda narrative.

As the storyline goes, Hamas is nothing more than a terrorist group and decided to stage the attack in Israel on October 7, 2023 and for no good reason randomly, which ended a period of peaceful coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians and left Netanyahu no choice but to eradicate Hamas. Therefore, though it’s not openly stated, Israel effectively had the right to do whatever it wanted in Gaza, which the way Yglesias interpreted that became an endorsement of ethic cleansing and genocide.

I’ll lay out some excerpts from Yglsias’s stories so you can see for yourself.

November 2, 2023

Israel really did try to maintain a modus vivendi with Hamas for a long time, Hamas really did break out of that dynamic with a spectacular attack on civilians, and countries who are attacked are allowed to counterattack. The civilian toll is tragic, but on some level I can understand why Israelis and others who are strongly pro-Israel are baffled by the vehemence of the condemnations.

In Gaza, Israel fundamentally is pursuing a just cause, though this is not to endorse all of their tactics. They were attacked by a violent Islamist movement whose stated goal is the eradication of their country and its replacement by an autocratic Islamist regime. The leaders of this movement based themselves in a dense urban area such that the only possible way of counterattacking them will generate massive collateral damage.

One cannot simply impute guilt for Hamas’ crimes to every Palestinian. But I do think it’s not well understood in the US that the group was acting broadly in line with the preferences of Gaza’s population. That doesn’t make the loss of life any less tragic. But I do think it underscores that, in Gaza, Israel’s goals are broadly consistent with normal wartime activity. It’s of course true that the situation in pre-war Gaza was not good. But nothing was stopping Hamas from articulating a set of demands for improving conditions in the Gaza Strip or even asking the international community to support the creation of an independent Republic of Gaza.

March 20, 2024

The bad actor here is Hamas for insisting on fighting to the last dead Palestinian baby rather than doing what most defeated and cornered armies in history have done and laying down their arms?

The Gaza Strip is a dense urban area. There is no realistic way to wage war there without killing and maiming kids and other civilians. I don’t think you can reasonably blame Israel for wanting to mount a significant military response to a threat that proved itself to be less-contained and less-deterred than the Israeli public had believed. And I think it is wrong to see the civilian death toll as purely a result of IDF brutality or evidence of genocidal intent.

There are excerpts from other stories I could add, but I’ll close with a note about a tweet Yglesias posted two months later. Having already exonerated Netanyahu, he did the same for Biden, writing in his usual flat, world-weary tone when discussing mass casualties of people of little importance to him, Yglesias expressed exasperation with starry-eyed young radicals “who believe there is some kind of ‘permanent ceasefire” button in the Oval Office that Joe Biden is perversely refusing to press.”

It turns out the US government does, in fact, have a button to get Israel to do what it wants, but the president has to push it. Biden didn’t; Trump did, and it works quite well, as seen yesterday when Netanyahu was forced to swallow the ceasefire deal.

Yglesias’s reporting on Israel and Gaza displays a level of ignorance and intellectual laziness that would be disqualifying if he had to apply for a license to report on the subject. It also reveals, yet again, that the boundaries of his moral outrage are narrow and selective, and so is the type of courage required by his particular brand of contrarianism.

Sullivan supposedly named the Yglesias Award after him because he was willing to make enemies by criticizing his own side, but that’s not what he does. His bravery is boundless when he’s attacking to the left or right, not in the center where he’s standing, so it was easy for him to make a fast accommodation with the bloodbath in Gaza: he’s on the same team as Biden and Netanyahu, and Palestinians are on the other.

Denouncing the mass murder of civilians, or IDF snipers shooting women through the head as they walk down the street, or Gaza being turned into the place with the highest per capita rate of child amputees on the planet doesn’t require courage, it requires a moral compass. Yglesias has neither, so rather than loudly opposing the carnage, he became bored, yawned, and slowly rolled over in bed and fell asleep.