Matt Taibbi

Is Trump’s America unavoidable? And how did we even get here? For months, razor-sharp polemicist Matt Taibbi tracked every step of the historic election that bore us President Trump and his ilk. In this bracing talk based on his new book, Insane Clown President: Dispatches from the American Circus, Taibbi illuminates not just what brought us to where we are now, but how we can be moving forward in the years to come. Deemed “…one of the few journalists in America who speaks truth to power” by Bernie Sanders, Taibbi’s keynote passionately outlines Sanders’s resignation to the ill-fated Clinton campaign. Rebellious, plainspoken, and hilarious, Taibbi’s talk is customizable to your audience’s needs, offering a lucid yet hopeful view of today’s America.

Over the last two decades, America has been falling deeper and deeper into a statistical mystery: Poverty goes up. Crime goes down. The prison population doubles. Fraud by the rich wipes out 40 percent of the world’s wealth. The rich get massively richer. No one goes to jail. In search of a solution, Matt Taibbi discovered the Divide, the seam in American life where our two most troubling trends—growing wealth inequality and mass incarceration—come together, driven by a dramatic shift in American citizenship: Our basic rights are now determined by our wealth or poverty. In this talk, Taibbi takes takes audiences on a galvanizing journey through both sides of our new system of justice—the worlds of the untouchably wealthy and the criminalized poor. Through astonishing—and enraging—accounts of the high-stakes capers of the wealthy and nightmare stories of regular people caught in the Divide’s punishing logic, Taibbi lays bare one of the greatest challenges we face in contemporary American life: surviving a system that devours the lives of the poor, turns a blind eye to the destructive crimes of the wealthy, and implicates us all.