defend the indefensible: glenn fucking greenwald

does he still have a fanbase?

I could see him just going full Fox News, as in with his own show there, by the end of the year

He's going to team up with Taibbi.

Oh, and just FTR:

Months before the NY Post story, a document passed around far-right websites detailed a vast Hunter Biden conspiracy.

The document's creator, Martin Aspen, claimed to be a Swiss intel professional.

But Aspen's face was created by AI. He doesn't exist.https://t.co/oA4aKTjkUp pic.twitter.com/U1MNqh8WmW

— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) October 29, 2020

List of questions @ggreenwald sent the Biden campaign. pic.twitter.com/civKyypfXk

— Hans Mahncke (@HansMahncke) October 29, 2020

expect it of sullivan and weiss, but i feel like a guy with a law degree should maybe understand that a 'refusal to print absolutely everything i write' does not equal 'censorship'

jfc

Just on a writing level, how do submit a lede like this? pic.twitter.com/Y1p5qhJUUr

— Matt Fuller (@MEPFuller) October 29, 2020

he put up the emails between him and editors and it makes him look insane and/or like a giant baby https://greenwald.substack.com/p/emails-with-intercept-editors-showing

Response of Betsy Reed yesterday

Our intention in sending the memo was for you to revise the story for publication. However, it's clear from your response this morning that you are unwilling to engage in a productive editorial process on this article, as we had hoped.

It would be unfortunate and detrimental to The Intercept for this story to be published elsewhere.

I have to add that your comments about The Intercept and your colleagues are offensive and unacceptable.

Betsy

why are you censoring meeeeeee

You'll never guess what the top story is on Tucker Carlson's show tonight. pic.twitter.com/0QkMwa7ws2

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) October 30, 2020

dude should just go all the way and change his name to "(emphasis added) iGlenn Greenwald". Has anyone else in history loved adding emphasis more?

Update 10:23pm: !

I get what Taibbi and Greenwald are saying, but dying on this hill in the service of another four years of a guy who is openly saying he wants to be a dictator is a choice that I'm having trouble understanding. Like would they have wanted to be the guys in Germany yelling about how unfair the media was being to Hitler? I dunno, maybe they're right, and losing trust in our media outlets has driven us into our media bubbles and made everything worse, but I think the media (old-school and social) is just trying to figure out how to deal with a bad actor who is happy to lie at scale, with a huge ecosystem of leeches, grifters, and conspiracy-peddling enablers happy to keep the lies rolling. I don't think that Greenwald or Taibbi has the answer to this crisis, and it seems like they are focusing more on an effect of Trumpism rather than a cause, much as they'd like to think it was the reverse.

dji otm. It’s possible that something embarrassing to Joe Biden could emerge from a deep dive of the hunter emails, but at this time, who cares? Trump is more corrupt than Biden.

expect it of sullivan and weiss, but i feel like a guy with a law degree should maybe understand that a 'refusal to print absolutely everything i write' does not equal 'censorship'

― mookieproof, Thursday, October 29, 2020 3:13 PM (five hours ago)

Having heard what law school consists of I wouldn’t go confusing “having a law degree” with being smart

tbf i didn't say 'smart'

heh fair enough

maybe they're right, and losing trust in our media outlets has driven us into our media bubbles and made everything worse

I think they are 100% right on this... the problem is they themselves (Greenwald and Taibbi) aren't any exception to the rule, despite any indignant cries of impartiality to the contrary. And the insulated, hyper partisan corner they've driven themselves into specifically is maybe the most poisonous one around.

I would say they are hyper-UN-partisan in a time that demands some side-taking.

lol, Greenwald’s constant readiness to go on Tucker at the drop of a hat would seem to put the lie to any insipid claim of nonpartisanship on his part.

Has he even had anything bad to say about this administration?

I would say they are hyper-UN-partisan in a time that demands some side-taking.

This sounds right - Taibbi less than Greenwald, but they're both fitting right in the kind of civil libertarian mold where an abstract principle about media quality/censorship is more important to them than the real world.

Glenn. fucking. greenwald.

Recall that under my contract, and the practice of The Intercept over the last seven years, none of my articles is edited unless it presents the possibility of legal liability or complex original reporting, and not one of my articles in the last fifteen years — published with dozens of major media outlets around the world — has ever been retracted or even had appended to it a serious correction.

This article should never have been subject to the whims and views of editors at all, let alone this heavy-handed attempt to protect Joe Biden.

it's deeply embarrassing that a guy who has called himself a "journalist" for years -- won a pulitzer for his work, even -- has no idea what an editor's role is. he thinks an editor pushing back on any aspect of one of his stories is no different than a publisher interfering in the editorial process. he even thinks a publication declining to run one of his stories without changing a word amounts to "censorship." greenwald has become such a joke that i feel embarrassed -- and honestly kind of depressed -- that i admired him for so long and defended his work for so many years.

Tbf I only skimmed his article because life is short.

His reasoning is so tortured and bizarre - "nobody claimed that a deal had been consummated so the inability to confirm it does not negate the story" or w/e - that its like being trapped in some MC Escher version of journalism where the gravity is always shifting, and the premise for what constitutes a newsworthy idea is always changing to be the opposite of whatever he imagines a critic would say. Engaging with it is just so exhausting. Tbh it reminds me of the frenzied disordered thinking of ppl in manic episodes - "I stayed up all night filling a notebook with reasons why YOU ALL are the ones who need help, not me!"

I just can't imagine why anyone would spend their precious time seriously reading him or Taibbi when there are actual media critics out there doing the actual work instead of whatever cosplay these two are engaged in. J.D. otm, it's honestly depressing.

this very public resignation seems well planned out. GG has probably been looking to break into the crowdfunded newsletter game for some time, and the Intercept has probably been getting annoyed with him for a long time as well. He's been on podcasts for the past couple of months carping about how he got blamed for the Reality Winner debacle when it was really the fault of the editors. Looks like he was just waiting for some pushback so he could dramatically break ties and complete his IDW heel turn.

This dude resigning right now in this way is an even less effective, more inside baseball October surprise than Hunter Biden bullshit itself.

new email Re: ornaldo bloomps for presidetn
From:
Glenn Greenwald <glenngreenw✧✧✧@gm✧✧✧.c✧✧>

8:01 AM (49 minutes ago)
To: h******✧✧✧@protonm✧✧✧.c✧✧
Show details
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Please note my new email address:

Gl✧✧✧.Greenw✧✧✧@ris✧✧✧.n✧✧

I got real excited there for a second.

Glenn.Greenwald at risingdick.net

Imagine the Hunter Biden story is the hill you choose to die on.

This is the thing to me. Greenwald's been evolving toward this point for a long time but what a casus belli. It's funny, I don't even see mainstream Republicans picking up the Hunter stuff, it's mostly the loony Trump base and the hardcore Berners.

The notion that this is anything more than would-be October surprise material of the lamest type imaginable would be hilarious even if it hadn't been telegraphed months ago in giant sky-high red letters. It's like we're supposed to forget that peddling this exact bullshit is what got Trump impeached just 10 months ago.

You must believe that we're not going to hear endlessly about Hunter and his deals for the next two years

just like Killary

Without congressional majorities it will be harder to call for sham hearings

Yeah, I don't know. The Hunter thing feels like such a nothing, and is so tied to Trump, that I'm not sure elected Republicans will try to push it much further, if Trump loses. I'm sure it will stay alive in the OANN/Fox universe.

end of day I think it's as simple as they thought they could run the same Killary playbook against a white male and it didn't work

otmfm

I'm digging into the Greenwald archives on Salon, and thought this was a fun time capsule.

https://www.salon.com/2008/03/08/carlson/

In this piece, he's saying the same shit about Tucker that he more recently says *on* "Tucker."

Jeet Heer has been saying that Trump just doesn’t know how to attack a white Christian male.

it turns out when you can't be racist or sexist you have to use your brain. sad!

The GOP definitely knew how to destroy Al Gore and John Kerry

The Hunter thing feels like such a nothing, and is so tied to Trump, that I'm not sure elected Republicans will try to push it much further, if Trump loses

Yeah I don't wanna jinx it but I suspect there are some rank-and-file Rs who will breathe a sigh of relief if T loses and they don't have to pretend-peddle his bullshit 24x7x365

Kerry didn't take much tbf xp

The Gore and Kerry playbook was kind of the same: attack the candidate as an aloof, out-of-touch, rich liberal elite. They've tried to do that a little with Biden, but it doesn't stick as much because Biden's public image is Good Old Middle-Class Scranton Joe, rather than a windsurfing French speaker who married an heiress or a boring sanctimonious tree hugger.

The GOP definitely knew how to destroy Al Gore and John Kerry

― Wayne Grotski (symsymsym), Friday, October 30, 2020 12:56 PM (six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i honestly don't remember the day to day campaigning from gore/bush enough to say...though gore did win and that election was straight up stolen.

wrt to kerry i think it's a little different than hillary because i don't think there was any real animus towards kerry

they were able to neutralize one of the things kerry thought would be a strength - his military service - with the swift boat stuff

i think kerry didn't foresee that but more important he and the DNC fell into this trap where they think "oh well all these republican voters say support our troops" so they will have a respect for kerry's service

of course, they don't really give a fuck about veterans unless "support our troops" is being used as a cudgel to shut down any criticism of the u.s. military's endless wars

i feel like in general trump's gop base doesn't have the appetite for u.s. world cop operations, and honestly hillary's hands are way more dirty in that respect than trump's were (and are really)

When even Tucker is tired of beating this horse: https://www.thedailybeast.com/tucker-carlson-suddenly-says-its-time-to-leave-hunter-biden-alone

obviously Greenwald has lib-derangement syndrome but the one point he sorta has is this hunter stuff is just dismissed entirely and censored from twitter etc. but on the other hand the Steele dossier was covered by all the respectable papers

Biden's public image is Good Old Middle-Class Scranton Joe, rather than a windsurfing French speaker who married an heiress or a boring sanctimonious tree hugger.

Yeah but those images of Gore and Kerry were created by GOP attack ads...it's weird to me that they never even really tried to change that image of Biden. Karl Rove must be rolling over in his grave.

wrt to kerry i think it's a little different than hillary because i don't think there was any real animus towards kerry

oh there was definitely hatred toward Kerry by those who remembered his testimony on Vietnam.

Yeah my aunt swears up and down she remembered it and had hated him ever since. I suspect her ‘memory’ was being filled in heavily by the unrelenting rightwing mediaverse at the time but hey i guess it worked

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/text-of-zell-millers-rnc-speech/

I'm sure it will stay alive in the OANN/Fox universe.

...and on the Trump network that will surely launch in mid-2021. But yeah this will be the new Solyndra, living on as a mutant, half-born zombie scandal.

Funny to read that old Salon column. I remember reading GG during the W Bush years and thinking christ this guy has a hair trigger about stupid shit, even for a blogger. Just these massive columns full of quote-blocks and oceans of bolded emphasis text, too-often spent making hay of some minor factual error by some other columnist or someone who quoted him, using the same lazy rhetoric that he's still using today. "I can only assume that [nobody huffpo blogger] is either too illiterate to comprehend the simple point I made in that column, or they are willfully misreading it in order to smear me! Much like the FBI smeared Martin Luther King and other truthtellers with COINTELPRO!" Have a very vivid memory of reading him tearfully rending his garments about some intra-columnist argument or other one day and thinking "yeah... I dont know how much I'm gonna learn from this guy." Amazing to think that his levels of peak hysteria were still over a decade away.

h8 greenwald but feel compelled to report he is looking pretty cute for 2020 in the vid i just scrolled past