Greenwald off the deep end
I’ve written about Glenn Greenwald several times and each time feels both more accurate and more pointless than the last. Greenwald is a perpetual object of derision for many of us—particularly those my age, I think, who came of age under the Obama presidency and saw Glenn as a reliable adversary of a growing bureaucratic national security state.
I think it’s safe to say we were wrong then, and perhaps our progressive disillusion about the state of things can be mirrored in the way Greenwald has changed (or, to whatever degree there are continuities been his positions back then and now—see his writing on immigration circa 2005—he is long gone).
Greenwald has become—in the words of Taylor Lorenz (a more credible journalist than he is, despite becoming the object of his and his allies’ perpetual attacks)—an “online influencer.” Eoin Higgins has called him a “right-wing pundit.” Regardless of whether you take Glenn seriously or not, or agree with his precepts that the “liberal-left” has lost its mind and only he remains genuinely devoted to criticizing or uncovering (or whatever it is he supposedly does) abuses of the national security state, it seems hard to deny that he is now firmly planted in one cultural and political camp.
Glenn’s output, in the last couple of years (much like fellow new-reactionary Taibbi) has significantly deteriorated; whether he was censored by The Intercept or wasn’t, he sure benefited linguistically from working with an editor. Most of us engage with him now based purely on his tweets, because what’s the point of digging further? But if you bother to, you’ll find him usually writing unreadable, rabid right-wing pablum.
One of Glenn’s more recent Twitter outbursts was a tepid defense of Tucker Carlson after the NYT’s “American Nationalist” series. Tepid in the sense that it was meekly produced, not tepid in that Greenwald showed any hesitation to defend—or willingness to criticize—his highest-profile patron. Glenn loves attention, I guess, and he loves to be on TV—so why criticize Tucker? He either doesn’t care or agrees with most of what he says, and so long as Tucker keeps Glenn on a long enough leash to pontificate about Hunter Biden, or MSNBC, or whatever the hell else he wants to say to reaffirm the existing prejudices of the Fox host’s white nationalist fanbase, Glenn isn’t going to rock the boat.
Glenn’s latest long-form work, as of this writing, was his response to the impending overturning of Roe v. Wade. In a now-characteristically aimless piece, he proffers a convoluted justification for the decision, based on an elementary-school level understanding of the American political system: “The Founders wanted to establish a democracy that empowered majorities of citizens to choose their leaders, but also feared that majorities would be inclined to coalesce around unjust laws that would deprive basic rights, and thus sought to impose limits on the power of majorities as well.” The purpose of this piece of “criticism” (if you can call it that) is not totally clear; I’d venture a guess that ostensibly civil libertarian lawyer Glenn is trying to cover his bases without antagonizing the right-wing readers/viewers and Fox News hosts to which he is now functionally subservient. Watching Glenn obsequiously prostrate himself for these people is not pretty (see this clip of him getting bumped off Laura Ingraham's show for Trump) but that’s where his market is, and he knows it.
There’s more you could say about Glenn—the way he reported on the Snowden leaks only to be instrumental in privatizing them; his unswerving loyalty to billionaire patrons; how this all might intersect with his libertarian origins; his flimsy defenses when cornered—but why bother? (Like Elon Musk) Glenn is the archetypal Twitter user: millions of followers, vain, loud, attention-seeking, stupid. What a disappointment this is what he’s become.