Glenn Greenwald goes full MAGA: Why the horseshoe left desperately needs Russia to succeed, again


Photo credit: Senado Federal, Flickr. License.

Last night, leftist hero Glenn Greenwald went on Tucker Carlson's show on Fox News to call House Intelligence Committee Chair and Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff a liar and breathe oxygen to a smear campaign against Joe Biden's family sourced to an active Russian asset, Rudy Giuliani.

For those of us who have been observing Greenwald since the early days of the Obama administration, this was no surprise. Glenn Greenwald is someone who has consistently allied with radical-right activists to promote an agenda destructive to democratic institutions and helpful to autocratic rule. They have built their brand of left populism on much the same basis as Trump's right-wing populism: on white grievance for the perceived loss of white privilege.

Throughout President Obama's tenure, Greenwald was exclusively focused in dramatizing fully legal activities of the US government, such as the use of drones and the killing of terrorists, to the point he even trashed President Obama for taking out Osama bin Laden.

None of Greenwald's energy as a self-styled civil liberties warrior has ever been directed at Vladimir Putin's brutal repression of the rights of the Russian people and assassinations and poisoning of Putin's political opponents, or at Russia's military invasions of the countries of Georgia and Ukraine, or the Kremlin's disruptions of democratic elections in Europe and in the United States. Russia is, however, protecting someone key to Greenwald's meal ticket, the American fugitive Edward Snowden. Snowden who stands accused cybercrimes in the United States much the same way Greenwald himself is facing charges in the Brazil, the country of his residence. Trump has openly mused about pardoning Snowden.

Greenwald also mounted a disinformation war against the unanimous judgment of American and allied intelligence agencies that Russia had sought to influence the American presidential election in 2016 and the Congressional investigations that, also with unanimity, agreed.

Time and again, Greenwald's focus has been to protect Putin and his interests and consistently participating in the right-wing disinformation campaigns to undermine confidence in the minds of the American people about our own intelligence services. When it comes to the Russian invasion of American elections, the rhetoric of Donald Trump and that of Green Greenwald have been closely matched, as if choreographed.

Greenwald, much like Trump, leads a cult, and he has plenty of friends in the "left" media. Ryan Grim (who also breathlessly spread a baseless and ever-changing hoax against Biden by Tara Reade), a Greenwald hire at his own online tabloid 'The Intercept', has been angrily denouncing social media platforms for limiting the viral spread of misinformation about Biden's family sourced to Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump's personal lawyer and an active Russian asset. Leftwing publication 'Common Dreams' and leftist publishers and commentators like Jordan Uhl as well as their sizable followings been all pushing a story that is almost certainly a Russian fake.

It's clear where the sympathies of Glenn Greenwald and the like-minded leftists lie: squarely with Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and in favor of using an active foreign intelligence operation to disrupt American democracy. Like Donald Trump, Greenwald, Grim, and others in their circle are invested dismantling the institutions of democracy and to install strongmen rulers at the behest of resurrecting the former Soviet Union.

And to be honest, Greenwald's white nationalist tendencies have always been hiding in plain sight.

Many have been vilified for saying that Greenwald's deeply personal opposition to President Obama was in good part due to his own white supremacist tendencies. Some have even pointed out that Greenwald's spouse and his children are not white, much the same way people have defended Donald Trump's antisemitism by pointing to his Jewish son-in-law. But the plain truth is that Greenwald spent a good part of his law career defending white supremacists. In fact, almost immediately before his days of building up to be a darling of the left in the mid-2000s, Greenwald spent five years representing American home-grown Neo-Nazis like Matthew Hale. Note, Greenwald wasn't just a civil liberties lawyer who occasionally caught a white supremacist client, he purposely spent half a decade seeking out and representing those clients.

But the same left that today despises Kamala Harris for having had a role in law enforcement as a Black woman and regularly beats up on Joe Biden for shaping, with full Black Caucus support, a crime bill that included an assault weapons ban and the Violence Against Women Act in 1994 immediately embraced one of the most prominent neo-Nazi defenders in the country switched careers to pen liberal-sounding columns about the Iraq war. The left was so hungry for someone - anyone - to represent it during a time when the national media was admittedly cheerleading for the Iraq war that it latched onto a literal defender of white nationalism.

Ultimately, Glenn Greenwald, Donald Trump, and Vladimir Putin have the same theory of the case: According to them, the United States and its democratic alliances have no moral superiority over autocratic regimes, globalism and multiculturalism are dangerous, and democracy itself is outdated. They seek to sow chaos in the democratic process. If Trump wins re-election, their case against democratic institutions (what they call 'establishment'), alliances, and global multiculturalism is strengthened. If Biden wins, Trump and his dark vision of humanity becomes but an aberration in history

Greenwald and the horseshoe left needs Russia to succeed again because they, like Trump, need a deeply divided nation, wounded beyond healing, to continue the grifts of grievance politics.

Let's fight back.




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