Feel like this post is an attempt to lure me into enumerating what are to me legitimate reasons as to why I dislike Glenn & Liz so I have to spend all day arguing with their stans. Nope! Not gonna fall for that! I left Twitter for a reason and I don’t miss it.
I thought I liked Glenn Greenwald for his journalistic integrity but now I’m thinking his dogs, his cute kids, handsome husband and vegan ways have something to do with it.
Damn, son! You're on fire today. I've heard the "Twitter is like a high school" comparison before, and I couldn't agree more. For years I constantly found myself agreeing with an IDPol-skeptical take or an article and going "oh no, what will my woke friends think of me if they knew? Would they disown me?"
But those days are over. I'm off Twitter and don't have to worry about it. I've met many other left-of-center people who went through the same thing and are enjoying the "Fuck You, Media" energy right now.
Yes, absolutely. And I would add this: the freest writers/people you see out there seem to be those who clearly feel loved by the small circle they truly care about, and this gives them the strength not to care about what anyone else thinks about them. Greenwald (with his husband, kids, and dogs) seems like a perfect example of this. And Sullivan, Weiss, Krugman, Bruenig, etc. ...
I think the "song and dance where you talk like he has Andrew Breitbart’s politics" is pretty well supported by Greenwald turning into a Fox News talking head. The music actually turns on when somebody tries to justify this - I believed he recently called Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon socialists.
And Noam Chomsky has gone on conservative media all the time in his career. Is he a closet reactionary too? I've done a bunch of conservative podcasts. What's the basis for thinking that appearing on conservative media is the same as being a conservative?
Fox News is not just a part of the conservative media universe, it's the beating heart of the Republican party. The institution is happy to have Greenwald around because he's giving Fox News viewers some new and fun angles to hate the Democrats from. He serves the institution's goals and if he didn't, he wouldn't have this open invitation to the most popular conservative show in the country.
Yeah he has to go on Fox News because the left press has gone full Stalin. The only thing missing are the gulags. He CAN'T go on Maddow and criticize the Left. Thank god for him - we need actual journalists who aren't afraid to tell the truth.
Agreed. It actually makes me angry at the left when there's something from a Taibbi or Greenwald I want to watch and I have to go to some hellhole like Reason (holy hell I hate libertarianism) or Fox to watch it.
Fox News is a commercial enterprise that found an immensely profitable niche serving an audience the rest of the media abandoned. They aren't the beating heart of anything.
"Appearing on Fox News" is a definition for nothing. Glenn Greenwald is no more a conservative than, as Freddie suggested, Noam Chomsky, or Matt Taibbi. He attacks liberal/left targets because it is necessary and no one else in the media will do it.
If you want to see conservatives attacked, well, you have the entire US national news media at your disposal. Glenn Greenwald is simply attempting to even the scales in a very small way.
Moreover, in a time when the words "brave" and "courageous" have been misapplied so generally they have virtually lost their meaning, Greenwald is one of maybe fewer than half a dozen American journalists that can truly be considered brave and courageous. Too bad this exceptional man has said mean things about your heroes. Perhaps you need new heroes.
I don't really care whether Greenwald 'is conservative'. He's serving the institutional goals of the most important Republican institution. If you don't agree about Fox News' towering role in American politics and you just think it's another commercial enterprise, I guess we'll agree to disagree.
I'm glad you replied because it gives me a chance to expand upon what I think is a bizarre idea you have of how American media should operate.
You insist Greenwald and anyone else who appears on Fox News must be conservative . . . because they appeared on Fox News.
So I suppose that means that anyone who appears on CNN or MSNBC must necessarily be a liberal or a democrat (not the same thing, heheh).
So in other words, according to you, media have no business providing platforms for a diversity of voices, but outlets instead should remain ideological silos and echo chambers. Have I got that right?
That, in my humble opinion, is a pretty fucking twisted idea of what national media should be.
Again - I really don't care about whether 'Glenn Greenwald is a conservative'. He openly believes he might be able to build alliances with Steve Bannon types and modern conservativism doesn't have concrete ideological boundaries / is mostly about hating Democrats, so it's not that hard to make the argument. You can also use some other definition of conservative where he wouldn't fit at all. The label really doesn't matter / isn't that interesting. Dude has some weird politics for sure.
But the Republican party is a lot less abstract than conservativism. And Fox News in practice exists as a wing of the Republican party. Paul Ryan is on the Board of Directors. The network has more control over the Republican political narrative than any politician does save for exactly Donald Trump.
CNN and MSNBC are part of a much more distributed web of power. They are certainly liberal institutions, run by people who don't want Republicans to win elections, but nobody at CNN has the type of influence on the Democratic party that Fox News anchors have on Republican politics. Is any Democrat actually scared of CNN turning on them? Does anyone honestly believe that Wolf Blitzer and Tucker Carlson have equal influence on American politics?
So again - 'Is Greenwald is a conservative?' is an debate that I don't really care about. Call him whatever you want. But he's joined an institution that exists as a branch of the Republican party, and that institution has welcomed him with open arms because they recognize him as an asset that can help Republicans win elections.
There is no safe way to criticize the Democratic Party without ruining, to some degree, one’s reputation. Glenn Greenwald has proven himself and could give a shit about the opinions of corrupt power brokers and their followers, thankfully.
This seems pretty simple. Greenwald has criticisms of the surveillance state -- that's the core of his professional identity. The surveillance state is increasingly Democrat-aligned. Fox gives him a platform through which he can get his criticisms out to millions and millions of people. Democrat-aligned media isn't giving him this platform, because the Democrats no longer believe in airing internal debates or internal dissent. His #1 priority is, understandably, getting his criticisms of the surveillance state out to as wide an audience as possible. Democrats can furrow their brows at the "defection", but if they don't like having these "defections" take place, then the best thing for Democrats to do would be to change their own behavior. Give airtime to internal dissent! Reverse these awful, repressive discursive trends from the past several years internal to progressive media culture. If the reversal doesn't happen, then the defections are merited and honorable.
I hate writing replies that are just "I agree" but this encapsulation is so perfectly stated. It's sad to me how many people can't distinguish between being a partisan and caring about an issue. This seems so simple and yet....
This is accurate. I thought Greenwald was a partisan hack until 2009... when he kept writing the exact same things he was writing before. Unlike many other critics of the War on Terror, he stuck to his principles when Obama won the election. For instance, he criticized assassination via drone, something no one was questioning.
The press is supposed to publish information and let the public decide what to do with it. Sometimes the press publishes secret information that is damaging to the security of all Americans. However, the only way we find out about our government abusing its power is from leaks of secret information. I don't expect the press to make the right decision every time. I expect them to do their job. It's the government's job to prevent leaks, not journalists'.
It's like the court system- in order for justice to be served, the prosecution and the defense should do their best, even though they serve different interests. Sometimes the wrong side wins, but the solution isn't to declare that defense lawyers are always wrong, or that prosecutors are always wrong. What matters is that the system allows both interests to be served in opposition to each other.
This is not happening in our country. We have a press corps that actively colludes with one of the political parties and with parts of the government, notably the intelligence agencies. They are supposed to be critics of politicians and government officials, but they are cooperating instead. The method of cooperation is blatant lying on behalf of their political allies. This is not in the interest of the public.
Checks and balances don't work when people who are supposed to be opponents publically support each other.
to be fair, Glenn has never really proclaimed to have leftist politics like Chomsky or you. I think he's pretty clearly a rich old libertarian, and he actually seems to spend a lot of his time on twitter conflating leftism and liberalism nowadays. I understand he has some overlapping targets for his ire with leftists sometimes, but his targets more recently include stuff like unions.
And yes he certainly has been a consistent critic of US imperialism, but that seems consistent with being a libertarian. I do think he has expressed support for universal healthcare at some point, but I'm not aware of him expressing any real views on redistribution of wealth. I think one thing to keep in mind is that Glenn Greenwald is a multi millionaire, and his views pretty frequently align with some of the worst silicon valley oligarchs. I've been in tech for ten years and I see him retweeting the ghouls that a lot of us think are joke because his views align with theirs.
Look up history and present use of word "libertarian" -- without the word "cultural" or "civil" in front of it, it means "believes in absolutist free-market economic principles." I have never seen or heard Greenwald promote absolutist free-market economic principles. He's a cultural or free-speech or "civil liberties" libertarian, but if you drop any such modifier and just say "he's a libertarian" and toss in "rich" then you are saying he's an economic libertarian, which is misleading bordering on being an outright lie.
seems ultimately beside the point that you were making in the article -- that it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if Glenn is odious or not. Sometimes odious, very bad people say things that are correct (intentionally or even accidentally), and the mentality of figuring out who is or is not a baddy or a goody lends itself to keeping your brain juvenile.
I basically agree with this logic and I think a lot of people here have fallen into defending bad things Greenwald is doing or his Bannon-esque politics because they believe that he is in fact, a goody.
It's also frustrating how this stuff goes back in time. People have a bunch of disagreements with Greenwald now (some of which I agree with and don't think are illegitimate reasons, though I think it's almost all unimportant online garbage now that I've mostly stopped following media discourse) so it must mean he was always a useless waste of space and they never actually valued his work.
Going to also use this as an excuse to remember Greenwald posting Tarek Mehanna's statement in full on his blog, which made me cry then and makes me cry now because there are very few people who would do such a thing even once and Greenwald was willing to do it all the time. Even when I was neck-deep in all that Twitter stuff and getting mad at Greenwald over some minor disagreement, I don't think I ever forgot how Greenwald was willing to get spitting mad over things like this.
I'm curious--was it always like this, or did something change?
I've always loved over-analyzing fiction, so I've been in fandom spaces as long as I've been on the internet. Around about 2014, there was a change. Before, if someone didn't like a character or a relationship, they'd just say that: that they didn't like the character, or thought the relationship had no chemistry, or what-have-you. Around 2014, this started to change. If someone didn't like a character, they would begin to invent reasons why it was *morally wrong* to like said character, including bizarre constructions like "oh, your favorite character from [show] is [white main character] and not [black tertiary character]? You're racist!" I kinda assumed it was just people learning a "more effective" way to argue, as at first people were blindsided by these arguments and didn't know how to deal with them, so they just agreed with them and the moralizers' arguments became fandom truth. But now I'm curious if it's something pulled in from Twitter, or reflections of a greater trend in media, or something that percolated out into media.
Another way to demonstrate this to the skeptical is to ask try a version of this with them:
“When you have a podcast/YouTuber/whatever that you love and that you are going to recommend to a friend, what do you say to your friends as your ‘pitch’ as to why they should listen/watch/whatever. Do you say ‘this person’s right about everything/on the right side of history?’ Or do you say ‘this persons funny/well-spoken/clever/open-minded/humble/ascerbic’ or ‘the production/visuals/editing is amazing?’”
Nearly everyone will admit that it’s a version of the latter. They recommend based on gut, lizard, aesthetic reasons. When they admit that, they’re usually open to conceding the following point: “if you’re recommending that someone DOES listen to _____ for emotional reasons, are you really asserting that, when you recommend that someone does NOT listen to _____, you’re suddenly accessing a completely different part of your brain?”
>>I remain baffled at how many adults seem to think that the point of life is to enjoy the meaningless mild approval of armies of strangers rather than to build a tight little network of friends and family who are passionately invested in you.
Well put.
In college, I worked at an on-campus institution that for some reason had a core group of leftist employees. Stridently leftist where they would talk about politics with random coworkers. They were older than me. I thought they were cool as hell. We happened to be on the same page politically but I was way too shy and insecure to form any meaningful relationship with them. Anyway, I think about that a lot when I consider the types of accounts I ended up following online.
I don't know if it's about "liking" you or not but I find in 2021 I can only read and support people I know are giving me a fair shake. What I mean by that is that they are not hiding their language behind some invisible curtain of code speak. They're being as close to honest as possible and taking heat for it, repeatedly. I can't read journalists or writers or critics who pander in their language so as not to offend. It is of no use to me. It is like attending a Christian rock concert. You know the songs are only going to be about one thing. They are never going to deviate from that one thing and they are never going to go anywhere beyond that one thing: loving Christ and building their lives around that. And so it goes with the modern cultural left, as that wonderful letter you sent out yesterday proves. The therapist only found meaning in being a crusader. And so what else is there? It turns my brain to cottage cheese.
By now I will listen to anyone who does not speak in coded language. Show me anyone. The Fifth Column, Quillette, or by now even Ben Shapiro. Your "Planet of Cops" piece is how I found you and I'm always curious about what you are wrestling with in a given day. I don't like what social media has done to us. I too have been swarmed and attacked almost as many times just as you have. It goes as quickly as it came. It doesn't define who you are. The best way to survive right now is simply this: you will agree with some things and not agree with others. Once you slip into dehumanization you have reached the danger zone and you must pull yourself back from the brink.
And gets to a deeper truth: wokism is a substitute religion. "Substitute" because it has no supernatural element, which is necessary for long-term survival. Substitute religions therefore need to be totalitarian to succeed in the short term: everything must be "political" so you don't have a spare moment to realize the emptiness. Thus the crusading therapist.
Yeah. Wokism is a substitute religion. Trumpism is a substitute religion. There are no gods, but it looks more and more to me like actual religions, or at least the modern, neutered versions of two of the three big monotheisms, did less harm than these 21st century substitutes.
Ditto. The Planet of Cops piece was how I found Freddie too. I had no clue of his history. But he's apologized, sought out professional help, and did everything he was supposed to do. That's a thumbs up in my book.
You had me at “Fair shake”. Seriously, I don’t care a about people’s politics anymore. I care about wether they’re being honest. Hard to figure out sometimes but we must. We must.
For the record I don’t think Ben Shapiro is very honest. I feel like Sam Harris (my guru) agrees. He’s cut out the opportunists like Shapiro & Dave Rubin. I’m guessing it’s cause he realized that they’re just trying to get clicks.
I could be wrong about Shapiro. He might be honest. Maybe it’s his religiousness. I don’t know.
I used to like Sam Harris but his exchange with Noam Chomsky turned my opinion on him. To his credit, Sam has posted that exchange on his website so you can read it there : https://samharris.org/the-limits-of-discourse/
Yeah, I remember that. I think Noam had one good quip in it about politicians who don’t care being morally worse than politicians who are ideological. I wish Sam had conceded that Noam was right.
But why did it turn you against him? Sam may have been wrong on that one point, but I still think Sam is honest & wants to reduce world suffering.
Aren’t you in alignment with Sam on things like vaccines as opposed to Brett Weinstein? (Who is also honest but I think he & his brother are missing some marbles and not as smart as they think they are.)
The points where I agree with Sam are not worth sticking with Sam. I am pro-science, but I don't like him and others in the new age atheism ilk because ultimately they do western establishment's bidding.
Speaking for myself, I don't care to interrogate the principles in the Harper's Letter because I think I can safely assume that my interpretation of the principles is very different from the signatories that, yes, I don't like. Do you think your interpretation of free speech or open debate is similar to Bari Weiss? I suspect not, we all know she built her career on silencing criticism of Israel. So what's the point in taking the proclamation at face value? If the signatories had been different people, the reaction would have been different. That seems like a good thing. If George Bush signs a letter in support of a free and democratic Iraq I'm not going to nod my head sagely and say yes I support that too, I'm going to use the context that I have for what he means by those words. And furthermore, I myself would not be signing a fucking letter *along with* George Bush about Iraq for just that very reason.
Also I think I didn't really know who you were before you got canceled, or maybe re-emerged from cancellation. "any press is good press" - Karl Marx
"Speaking for myself, I don't care to interrogate the principles in the Harper's Letter because I think I can safely assume that my interpretation of the principles is very different from the signatories that, yes, I don't like."
Can I ask you to please actually read the letter ignoring who signed it and tell me why you object to what was said? Numerous people who signed the letter said that signing the letter did not mean they agreed with the other signatories on any other issue, just that they agreed on the principles discussed in the letter. The letter essentially said that there should be open debate about issues and that complex issues shouldn't be reduced to simple solutions. Did Bari Weiss build her career on silencing criticism of Israel or did she give full-throated support to Israel? There's a big difference. In the former, that's abuse of power and anti-free speech; in the latter, it's exercising her right to free speech.
Reading your comment, I think you and I might have some fundamental political differences, but that doesn't mean we can't discuss it, right? And discussing things rationally and in good faith, perhaps we'll see another side, perhaps change an opinion, or at least respect the other person's perspective? That is essentially the principle of the Harper's Letter.
I'm not going to recite all the things Bari Weiss has done to conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism. It's how she built her career. If you don't share that view, fine, but to me it is obvious.
I have read the letter. There is nothing objectionable in it. You understand that there can be context taken into account outside of the words on the page though yes? People are capable of saying "I support free speech" while doing vile, undemocratic things to silence views they don't like, and I think many of the signatories have done exactly that.
Again, this is why I use the George Bush and Iraq analogy. If he wrote a letter in support of a free democratic Iraq, lamenting the silencing of dissenting views, would you consider that he used those exact words to start a war that killed millions of people, or would you just take his words at face value and assume that he means the good version that you like?
totally valid, I just disagree. It's silly to pretend that everyone that disliked the Harper's Letter "hasn't read" it or whatever. I fully understand the principles and the stakes. I think that signing a letter with people like Bari Weiss gives her more legitimacy that she uses to undermine those principles, as I the debate over the letter has illustrated ("Chomsky signed it, don't you agree with him?").
It's a question of strategy. It's fine to disagree.
I can only speak for myself, of course, but as someone who has deployed the phrase "facts and logic" derisively in the past, it was as a way of highlighting that the person's opinions were not, in fact, based solely around facts and logic as they liked to believe, as though they were some sort of impersonal calculating machine that had arrived at The Correct Answer to the Question of Politics, but that they instead by and large arrived at their opinions in the same way as those they dismissively derided as being swayed by "emotion," by simply selectively paying attention to facts and using specious logic to justify their preexisting emotional reactions to things.
Like so many other things on the internet, it was cool, people saw that it was cool and so emulated it, and then it became more and more cliched and distorted, and now it just drives me up the wall. But I respect the initial reasoning.
I like to think I can make the separation; I am surrounded by people with very different politics from me.
Of the Substackers I subscribe to: no, I don't really think I'd like to share a beer with you, Freddie, and I only really enjoy or agree with maybe a half to two thirds of what you write. But I heartily enjoy the rest of it and I appreciate your zero fucks given attitude. We need more of that.
Pretty sure I wouldn't want to spend much social time with Michael Tracey either.
I'd love to share a beer with Glenn Greenwald, but just one. I don't think I could take him for more than one beer.
I'd could spend an entire evening with Matt Taibbi, I think, though I suspect before too long he would ditch me out the back entrance on the pretext of visiting the men's room.
As for Astral Codex Ten, who knows? I understand he charges you to hang out with him.
The only substacker I feel confident I would want to hang out with is Andrew Sullivan. I disagree with him a lot but somehow his basic human vulnerability always comes through. I was an avid Daily Dish reader back before there was social media per se and that’s where I first read Conor Friedersdorf and Freddie de Boer who both blogged for Andrew when he was off. At first I would read their posts and when it was Conor I would think “that is so much more even keeled than Andrew usually sounds” and then notice the byline. With Freddie I would just think “what?” and then see his name. And of course I developed an indirect fondness for Matt Yglesias from the “Matthew Yglesias Awards” that Andrew would dispense to people willing to critique their own side. So most of my substack life is reliving the Daily Dish heyday.
Isn’t this is just another reason not to take people or their views seriously? We live in an anti-authority age, with the vanguard of that tendency now empowered and authoritative, ironically.
The reduction to animal/gorilla mentality is almost a kind of brutish caricature of how the old aristocracy viewed the rest of society. That said, if I grew up in the American high school system, I might make that judgement, it seems especially animalistic and frenzied. Other people around the world are more restrained, try Laos. Very civilised and charming children, eager to learn and very respectful of authority. They’d probably be called repressed by American crackhead college students.
I was forced to admit this when I realized that I liked Andrew Sullivan and always would no matter how wrong he was about absolutely everything.
Feel like this post is an attempt to lure me into enumerating what are to me legitimate reasons as to why I dislike Glenn & Liz so I have to spend all day arguing with their stans. Nope! Not gonna fall for that! I left Twitter for a reason and I don’t miss it.
stay strong brother
I thought I liked Glenn Greenwald for his journalistic integrity but now I’m thinking his dogs, his cute kids, handsome husband and vegan ways have something to do with it.
Damn, son! You're on fire today. I've heard the "Twitter is like a high school" comparison before, and I couldn't agree more. For years I constantly found myself agreeing with an IDPol-skeptical take or an article and going "oh no, what will my woke friends think of me if they knew? Would they disown me?"
But those days are over. I'm off Twitter and don't have to worry about it. I've met many other left-of-center people who went through the same thing and are enjoying the "Fuck You, Media" energy right now.
Yes, absolutely. And I would add this: the freest writers/people you see out there seem to be those who clearly feel loved by the small circle they truly care about, and this gives them the strength not to care about what anyone else thinks about them. Greenwald (with his husband, kids, and dogs) seems like a perfect example of this. And Sullivan, Weiss, Krugman, Bruenig, etc. ...
I think the "song and dance where you talk like he has Andrew Breitbart’s politics" is pretty well supported by Greenwald turning into a Fox News talking head. The music actually turns on when somebody tries to justify this - I believed he recently called Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon socialists.
And Noam Chomsky has gone on conservative media all the time in his career. Is he a closet reactionary too? I've done a bunch of conservative podcasts. What's the basis for thinking that appearing on conservative media is the same as being a conservative?
Fox News is not just a part of the conservative media universe, it's the beating heart of the Republican party. The institution is happy to have Greenwald around because he's giving Fox News viewers some new and fun angles to hate the Democrats from. He serves the institution's goals and if he didn't, he wouldn't have this open invitation to the most popular conservative show in the country.
Yeah he has to go on Fox News because the left press has gone full Stalin. The only thing missing are the gulags. He CAN'T go on Maddow and criticize the Left. Thank god for him - we need actual journalists who aren't afraid to tell the truth.
Agreed. It actually makes me angry at the left when there's something from a Taibbi or Greenwald I want to watch and I have to go to some hellhole like Reason (holy hell I hate libertarianism) or Fox to watch it.
Fox News is a commercial enterprise that found an immensely profitable niche serving an audience the rest of the media abandoned. They aren't the beating heart of anything.
"Appearing on Fox News" is a definition for nothing. Glenn Greenwald is no more a conservative than, as Freddie suggested, Noam Chomsky, or Matt Taibbi. He attacks liberal/left targets because it is necessary and no one else in the media will do it.
If you want to see conservatives attacked, well, you have the entire US national news media at your disposal. Glenn Greenwald is simply attempting to even the scales in a very small way.
Moreover, in a time when the words "brave" and "courageous" have been misapplied so generally they have virtually lost their meaning, Greenwald is one of maybe fewer than half a dozen American journalists that can truly be considered brave and courageous. Too bad this exceptional man has said mean things about your heroes. Perhaps you need new heroes.
I don't really care whether Greenwald 'is conservative'. He's serving the institutional goals of the most important Republican institution. If you don't agree about Fox News' towering role in American politics and you just think it's another commercial enterprise, I guess we'll agree to disagree.
I'm glad you replied because it gives me a chance to expand upon what I think is a bizarre idea you have of how American media should operate.
You insist Greenwald and anyone else who appears on Fox News must be conservative . . . because they appeared on Fox News.
So I suppose that means that anyone who appears on CNN or MSNBC must necessarily be a liberal or a democrat (not the same thing, heheh).
So in other words, according to you, media have no business providing platforms for a diversity of voices, but outlets instead should remain ideological silos and echo chambers. Have I got that right?
That, in my humble opinion, is a pretty fucking twisted idea of what national media should be.
Again - I really don't care about whether 'Glenn Greenwald is a conservative'. He openly believes he might be able to build alliances with Steve Bannon types and modern conservativism doesn't have concrete ideological boundaries / is mostly about hating Democrats, so it's not that hard to make the argument. You can also use some other definition of conservative where he wouldn't fit at all. The label really doesn't matter / isn't that interesting. Dude has some weird politics for sure.
But the Republican party is a lot less abstract than conservativism. And Fox News in practice exists as a wing of the Republican party. Paul Ryan is on the Board of Directors. The network has more control over the Republican political narrative than any politician does save for exactly Donald Trump.
CNN and MSNBC are part of a much more distributed web of power. They are certainly liberal institutions, run by people who don't want Republicans to win elections, but nobody at CNN has the type of influence on the Democratic party that Fox News anchors have on Republican politics. Is any Democrat actually scared of CNN turning on them? Does anyone honestly believe that Wolf Blitzer and Tucker Carlson have equal influence on American politics?
So again - 'Is Greenwald is a conservative?' is an debate that I don't really care about. Call him whatever you want. But he's joined an institution that exists as a branch of the Republican party, and that institution has welcomed him with open arms because they recognize him as an asset that can help Republicans win elections.
There is no safe way to criticize the Democratic Party without ruining, to some degree, one’s reputation. Glenn Greenwald has proven himself and could give a shit about the opinions of corrupt power brokers and their followers, thankfully.
This seems pretty simple. Greenwald has criticisms of the surveillance state -- that's the core of his professional identity. The surveillance state is increasingly Democrat-aligned. Fox gives him a platform through which he can get his criticisms out to millions and millions of people. Democrat-aligned media isn't giving him this platform, because the Democrats no longer believe in airing internal debates or internal dissent. His #1 priority is, understandably, getting his criticisms of the surveillance state out to as wide an audience as possible. Democrats can furrow their brows at the "defection", but if they don't like having these "defections" take place, then the best thing for Democrats to do would be to change their own behavior. Give airtime to internal dissent! Reverse these awful, repressive discursive trends from the past several years internal to progressive media culture. If the reversal doesn't happen, then the defections are merited and honorable.
I hate writing replies that are just "I agree" but this encapsulation is so perfectly stated. It's sad to me how many people can't distinguish between being a partisan and caring about an issue. This seems so simple and yet....
This is accurate. I thought Greenwald was a partisan hack until 2009... when he kept writing the exact same things he was writing before. Unlike many other critics of the War on Terror, he stuck to his principles when Obama won the election. For instance, he criticized assassination via drone, something no one was questioning.
The press is supposed to publish information and let the public decide what to do with it. Sometimes the press publishes secret information that is damaging to the security of all Americans. However, the only way we find out about our government abusing its power is from leaks of secret information. I don't expect the press to make the right decision every time. I expect them to do their job. It's the government's job to prevent leaks, not journalists'.
It's like the court system- in order for justice to be served, the prosecution and the defense should do their best, even though they serve different interests. Sometimes the wrong side wins, but the solution isn't to declare that defense lawyers are always wrong, or that prosecutors are always wrong. What matters is that the system allows both interests to be served in opposition to each other.
This is not happening in our country. We have a press corps that actively colludes with one of the political parties and with parts of the government, notably the intelligence agencies. They are supposed to be critics of politicians and government officials, but they are cooperating instead. The method of cooperation is blatant lying on behalf of their political allies. This is not in the interest of the public.
Checks and balances don't work when people who are supposed to be opponents publically support each other.
to be fair, Glenn has never really proclaimed to have leftist politics like Chomsky or you. I think he's pretty clearly a rich old libertarian, and he actually seems to spend a lot of his time on twitter conflating leftism and liberalism nowadays. I understand he has some overlapping targets for his ire with leftists sometimes, but his targets more recently include stuff like unions.
No, Greenwald is not a leftist. He was just one of those many right-wingers who endorsed AOC very early in her political career.
Greenwald is clearly not a libertarian, but he does strongly support civil liberties/ freedom of speech.
what left wing policies does he support?
Unions, universal healthcare, anti militaristic, policy that helps low income people/ families, etc.
it's unclear to me that he does actually support unions, he spends a lot of time trying to depict them as tools of wokeness: https://twitter.com/hamiltonnolan/status/1361158148049010693?s=20.
And yes he certainly has been a consistent critic of US imperialism, but that seems consistent with being a libertarian. I do think he has expressed support for universal healthcare at some point, but I'm not aware of him expressing any real views on redistribution of wealth. I think one thing to keep in mind is that Glenn Greenwald is a multi millionaire, and his views pretty frequently align with some of the worst silicon valley oligarchs. I've been in tech for ten years and I see him retweeting the ghouls that a lot of us think are joke because his views align with theirs.
Look up history and present use of word "libertarian" -- without the word "cultural" or "civil" in front of it, it means "believes in absolutist free-market economic principles." I have never seen or heard Greenwald promote absolutist free-market economic principles. He's a cultural or free-speech or "civil liberties" libertarian, but if you drop any such modifier and just say "he's a libertarian" and toss in "rich" then you are saying he's an economic libertarian, which is misleading bordering on being an outright lie.
seems ultimately beside the point that you were making in the article -- that it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if Glenn is odious or not. Sometimes odious, very bad people say things that are correct (intentionally or even accidentally), and the mentality of figuring out who is or is not a baddy or a goody lends itself to keeping your brain juvenile.
I basically agree with this logic and I think a lot of people here have fallen into defending bad things Greenwald is doing or his Bannon-esque politics because they believe that he is in fact, a goody.
It's also frustrating how this stuff goes back in time. People have a bunch of disagreements with Greenwald now (some of which I agree with and don't think are illegitimate reasons, though I think it's almost all unimportant online garbage now that I've mostly stopped following media discourse) so it must mean he was always a useless waste of space and they never actually valued his work.
Going to also use this as an excuse to remember Greenwald posting Tarek Mehanna's statement in full on his blog, which made me cry then and makes me cry now because there are very few people who would do such a thing even once and Greenwald was willing to do it all the time. Even when I was neck-deep in all that Twitter stuff and getting mad at Greenwald over some minor disagreement, I don't think I ever forgot how Greenwald was willing to get spitting mad over things like this.
seems like the personal fights in media are so intense because the stakes are so low
I'm curious--was it always like this, or did something change?
I've always loved over-analyzing fiction, so I've been in fandom spaces as long as I've been on the internet. Around about 2014, there was a change. Before, if someone didn't like a character or a relationship, they'd just say that: that they didn't like the character, or thought the relationship had no chemistry, or what-have-you. Around 2014, this started to change. If someone didn't like a character, they would begin to invent reasons why it was *morally wrong* to like said character, including bizarre constructions like "oh, your favorite character from [show] is [white main character] and not [black tertiary character]? You're racist!" I kinda assumed it was just people learning a "more effective" way to argue, as at first people were blindsided by these arguments and didn't know how to deal with them, so they just agreed with them and the moralizers' arguments became fandom truth. But now I'm curious if it's something pulled in from Twitter, or reflections of a greater trend in media, or something that percolated out into media.
Another way to demonstrate this to the skeptical is to ask try a version of this with them:
“When you have a podcast/YouTuber/whatever that you love and that you are going to recommend to a friend, what do you say to your friends as your ‘pitch’ as to why they should listen/watch/whatever. Do you say ‘this person’s right about everything/on the right side of history?’ Or do you say ‘this persons funny/well-spoken/clever/open-minded/humble/ascerbic’ or ‘the production/visuals/editing is amazing?’”
Nearly everyone will admit that it’s a version of the latter. They recommend based on gut, lizard, aesthetic reasons. When they admit that, they’re usually open to conceding the following point: “if you’re recommending that someone DOES listen to _____ for emotional reasons, are you really asserting that, when you recommend that someone does NOT listen to _____, you’re suddenly accessing a completely different part of your brain?”
>>I remain baffled at how many adults seem to think that the point of life is to enjoy the meaningless mild approval of armies of strangers rather than to build a tight little network of friends and family who are passionately invested in you.
Well put.
In college, I worked at an on-campus institution that for some reason had a core group of leftist employees. Stridently leftist where they would talk about politics with random coworkers. They were older than me. I thought they were cool as hell. We happened to be on the same page politically but I was way too shy and insecure to form any meaningful relationship with them. Anyway, I think about that a lot when I consider the types of accounts I ended up following online.
I don't know if it's about "liking" you or not but I find in 2021 I can only read and support people I know are giving me a fair shake. What I mean by that is that they are not hiding their language behind some invisible curtain of code speak. They're being as close to honest as possible and taking heat for it, repeatedly. I can't read journalists or writers or critics who pander in their language so as not to offend. It is of no use to me. It is like attending a Christian rock concert. You know the songs are only going to be about one thing. They are never going to deviate from that one thing and they are never going to go anywhere beyond that one thing: loving Christ and building their lives around that. And so it goes with the modern cultural left, as that wonderful letter you sent out yesterday proves. The therapist only found meaning in being a crusader. And so what else is there? It turns my brain to cottage cheese.
By now I will listen to anyone who does not speak in coded language. Show me anyone. The Fifth Column, Quillette, or by now even Ben Shapiro. Your "Planet of Cops" piece is how I found you and I'm always curious about what you are wrestling with in a given day. I don't like what social media has done to us. I too have been swarmed and attacked almost as many times just as you have. It goes as quickly as it came. It doesn't define who you are. The best way to survive right now is simply this: you will agree with some things and not agree with others. Once you slip into dehumanization you have reached the danger zone and you must pull yourself back from the brink.
"Like attending a Christian rock concert" is brilliant.
And gets to a deeper truth: wokism is a substitute religion. "Substitute" because it has no supernatural element, which is necessary for long-term survival. Substitute religions therefore need to be totalitarian to succeed in the short term: everything must be "political" so you don't have a spare moment to realize the emptiness. Thus the crusading therapist.
Yeah. Wokism is a substitute religion. Trumpism is a substitute religion. There are no gods, but it looks more and more to me like actual religions, or at least the modern, neutered versions of two of the three big monotheisms, did less harm than these 21st century substitutes.
Ditto. The Planet of Cops piece was how I found Freddie too. I had no clue of his history. But he's apologized, sought out professional help, and did everything he was supposed to do. That's a thumbs up in my book.
You had me at “Fair shake”. Seriously, I don’t care a about people’s politics anymore. I care about wether they’re being honest. Hard to figure out sometimes but we must. We must.
For the record I don’t think Ben Shapiro is very honest. I feel like Sam Harris (my guru) agrees. He’s cut out the opportunists like Shapiro & Dave Rubin. I’m guessing it’s cause he realized that they’re just trying to get clicks.
I could be wrong about Shapiro. He might be honest. Maybe it’s his religiousness. I don’t know.
I used to like Sam Harris but his exchange with Noam Chomsky turned my opinion on him. To his credit, Sam has posted that exchange on his website so you can read it there : https://samharris.org/the-limits-of-discourse/
Yeah, I remember that. I think Noam had one good quip in it about politicians who don’t care being morally worse than politicians who are ideological. I wish Sam had conceded that Noam was right.
But why did it turn you against him? Sam may have been wrong on that one point, but I still think Sam is honest & wants to reduce world suffering.
Aren’t you in alignment with Sam on things like vaccines as opposed to Brett Weinstein? (Who is also honest but I think he & his brother are missing some marbles and not as smart as they think they are.)
The points where I agree with Sam are not worth sticking with Sam. I am pro-science, but I don't like him and others in the new age atheism ilk because ultimately they do western establishment's bidding.
Speaking for myself, I don't care to interrogate the principles in the Harper's Letter because I think I can safely assume that my interpretation of the principles is very different from the signatories that, yes, I don't like. Do you think your interpretation of free speech or open debate is similar to Bari Weiss? I suspect not, we all know she built her career on silencing criticism of Israel. So what's the point in taking the proclamation at face value? If the signatories had been different people, the reaction would have been different. That seems like a good thing. If George Bush signs a letter in support of a free and democratic Iraq I'm not going to nod my head sagely and say yes I support that too, I'm going to use the context that I have for what he means by those words. And furthermore, I myself would not be signing a fucking letter *along with* George Bush about Iraq for just that very reason.
Also I think I didn't really know who you were before you got canceled, or maybe re-emerged from cancellation. "any press is good press" - Karl Marx
"Speaking for myself, I don't care to interrogate the principles in the Harper's Letter because I think I can safely assume that my interpretation of the principles is very different from the signatories that, yes, I don't like."
Can I ask you to please actually read the letter ignoring who signed it and tell me why you object to what was said? Numerous people who signed the letter said that signing the letter did not mean they agreed with the other signatories on any other issue, just that they agreed on the principles discussed in the letter. The letter essentially said that there should be open debate about issues and that complex issues shouldn't be reduced to simple solutions. Did Bari Weiss build her career on silencing criticism of Israel or did she give full-throated support to Israel? There's a big difference. In the former, that's abuse of power and anti-free speech; in the latter, it's exercising her right to free speech.
Reading your comment, I think you and I might have some fundamental political differences, but that doesn't mean we can't discuss it, right? And discussing things rationally and in good faith, perhaps we'll see another side, perhaps change an opinion, or at least respect the other person's perspective? That is essentially the principle of the Harper's Letter.
I'm not going to recite all the things Bari Weiss has done to conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism. It's how she built her career. If you don't share that view, fine, but to me it is obvious.
I have read the letter. There is nothing objectionable in it. You understand that there can be context taken into account outside of the words on the page though yes? People are capable of saying "I support free speech" while doing vile, undemocratic things to silence views they don't like, and I think many of the signatories have done exactly that.
Again, this is why I use the George Bush and Iraq analogy. If he wrote a letter in support of a free democratic Iraq, lamenting the silencing of dissenting views, would you consider that he used those exact words to start a war that killed millions of people, or would you just take his words at face value and assume that he means the good version that you like?
It would not matter what he "means". This is the whole issue.
I support a free democratic Iraq, and would sign a letter that said so, no matter who else signed it, or what I thought their secret motivations were.
totally valid, I just disagree. It's silly to pretend that everyone that disliked the Harper's Letter "hasn't read" it or whatever. I fully understand the principles and the stakes. I think that signing a letter with people like Bari Weiss gives her more legitimacy that she uses to undermine those principles, as I the debate over the letter has illustrated ("Chomsky signed it, don't you agree with him?").
It's a question of strategy. It's fine to disagree.
I can only speak for myself, of course, but as someone who has deployed the phrase "facts and logic" derisively in the past, it was as a way of highlighting that the person's opinions were not, in fact, based solely around facts and logic as they liked to believe, as though they were some sort of impersonal calculating machine that had arrived at The Correct Answer to the Question of Politics, but that they instead by and large arrived at their opinions in the same way as those they dismissively derided as being swayed by "emotion," by simply selectively paying attention to facts and using specious logic to justify their preexisting emotional reactions to things.
Like so many other things on the internet, it was cool, people saw that it was cool and so emulated it, and then it became more and more cliched and distorted, and now it just drives me up the wall. But I respect the initial reasoning.
I like to think I can make the separation; I am surrounded by people with very different politics from me.
Of the Substackers I subscribe to: no, I don't really think I'd like to share a beer with you, Freddie, and I only really enjoy or agree with maybe a half to two thirds of what you write. But I heartily enjoy the rest of it and I appreciate your zero fucks given attitude. We need more of that.
Pretty sure I wouldn't want to spend much social time with Michael Tracey either.
I'd love to share a beer with Glenn Greenwald, but just one. I don't think I could take him for more than one beer.
I'd could spend an entire evening with Matt Taibbi, I think, though I suspect before too long he would ditch me out the back entrance on the pretext of visiting the men's room.
As for Astral Codex Ten, who knows? I understand he charges you to hang out with him.
The only substacker I feel confident I would want to hang out with is Andrew Sullivan. I disagree with him a lot but somehow his basic human vulnerability always comes through. I was an avid Daily Dish reader back before there was social media per se and that’s where I first read Conor Friedersdorf and Freddie de Boer who both blogged for Andrew when he was off. At first I would read their posts and when it was Conor I would think “that is so much more even keeled than Andrew usually sounds” and then notice the byline. With Freddie I would just think “what?” and then see his name. And of course I developed an indirect fondness for Matt Yglesias from the “Matthew Yglesias Awards” that Andrew would dispense to people willing to critique their own side. So most of my substack life is reliving the Daily Dish heyday.
Isn’t this is just another reason not to take people or their views seriously? We live in an anti-authority age, with the vanguard of that tendency now empowered and authoritative, ironically.
The reduction to animal/gorilla mentality is almost a kind of brutish caricature of how the old aristocracy viewed the rest of society. That said, if I grew up in the American high school system, I might make that judgement, it seems especially animalistic and frenzied. Other people around the world are more restrained, try Laos. Very civilised and charming children, eager to learn and very respectful of authority. They’d probably be called repressed by American crackhead college students.