When Glenn Greenwald Attacks

[Celerity]

Greenwald attacked me on Twitter but botched it so badly he ran off without a fight.

https://thebanter.substack.com/p/when-glenn-greenwald-attacks



Perhaps the saddest spectacle in journalism is the transformation of a respected voice into a right wing shill. It happens to the greats; Christopher Hitchens famously left decades of serious reporting and commentary to join the rabid neocon movement in the early 2000s. David Horowitz went all the way from radical Leftist, to conservative, to MAGA nutjob over a six decade career. Matt Taibbi went from lobbing bombs at Wall St to brown nosing Tucker Carlson, and Glenn Greenwald went from Pulitzer prize winning journalism to trolling liberals on a former cat sharing site filled with White Nationalists.

It is one thing to refine one’s thinking over time, but to abandon basic moral decency is something entirely different. Hitchens didn’t just “evolve” his thinking, he spent years promoting George W. Bush’s horrendous lies about Iraq when he knew better. Horowitz abandoned any sense of decency entirely when fervently boarding the MAGA train, his main achievement now being the careful mentorship of Trump’s anti immigration psychopath Stephen Miller. Greenwald now revels in saddling up to racists and ethno-nationalists, mostly because it irritates liberals. The younger versions of these journalists would be repulsed by their older selves.

I still follow Matt Taibbi on Twitter and read his Substack newsletter in the vague hope that the once great journalist may someday return. Taibbi has at least shown flashes of his former self and some intellectual honesty when he gets things terribly wrong. Like most of his former fans though, I fear he is lost to the fringes of Alt Left/Alt Right grifterdom for good.

Of all the depressing conversion stories though, Greenwald’s is the most egregious, and the most wretched. And I speak from experience here having recently been subjected to one of his venomous attacks on Twitter. It is a story worth telling because it reveals just how low Greenwald can sink, and just how bad his “journalism” has become.

The background...........

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