If you’re citing Matt Taibbi as a trustworthy source, man, I don’t know. He’s up there with Bari Weiss for “they’re either intentionally bad faith, stupid, or both” levels of nuance.
I not only read what he wrote, I read the screenshots of OG twitter. And what he said mirrored what they said. They were incredibly one sided an censorious as hell. Your post is basically just an ad hominem. A fallacy.
For something to be an ad hominem, one needs to be 1) addressing or responding to an argument 2) by attacking the character of the person making the argument rather than the substance of the argument.
Even though OP didn’t provide them, I can think of many supporting examples for their assertion that Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi are either intentionally operating in bad faith, or stupid, or both. So this does not at all meet the definition of ad hominem.
Put another way: “you’re wrong because you’re stupid” is an ad hominem. “You’re wrong, and I think you’re stupid because [reason]” is not. This holds even if the person making the argument does not explicitly give the reason.
> For something to be an ad hominem you simply need to address the speaker rather than what was said
No, this is a common misconception. Addressing the speaker is part of it but is not sufficient by itself.
People who are quick to claim “ad hominem!” have been getting this wrong basically forever, so please feel free to educate yourself by reading this excellent post: https://laurencetennant.com/bonds/adhominem.html
“It is not a logical fallacy to attack someone; the fallacy comes from assuming that a personal attack is also necessarily an attack on that person's arguments.
Therefore, if you can't demonstrate that your opponent is trying to counter your argument by attacking you, you can't demonstrate that he is resorting to ad hominem.”
These are not serious people.