WTF Happened to Glenn Greenwald & Alan Dershowitz?

[LFC]

Yeah, just WTF did happen to him? Sold out? Lashing out? Just lost his grip on reality?

DISGUSTING & DANGEROUS,” screamed the banner headline at the bottom of the television screen, just under the blonde-sheathed visage of Fox News’ Laura Ingraham. “GREENWALD BLASTS INTERCEPT FOR SMEARING INGRAHAM GUESTS.”

And so during a recent episode of The Ingraham Angle, Glenn Greenwald—who is so familiar to the top-rated cable channel’s millions of viewers that he requires only a surname—put on a suit and tie in Rio de Janeiro, where he lives, to continue doing what has occupied his energies for much of the past month.

That’s deploying every conceivable platform—from Twitter (where he has 1.6 million followers) to YouTube to Substack to an array of popular conservative websites to the very top of the ziggurat, Rupert Murdoch’s corporate cash cow—to denounce former friends and colleagues at The Intercept, the left-leaning digital news and opinion site he co-founded with Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill in 2013.

“These millennial digital liberal outlets like the Intercept, BuzzFeed, the Huffington Post, so many of them—they think that if you’re a conservative, you’re not really a journalist,” the 54-year-old Greenwald intoned (a tad weirdly, because most of his targets are in their late forties and fifties), while Ingraham could barely contain a gleeful grin. “They think that you’re part of this crypto-fascist movement, that you’re the enemy,” he added—referring to two young conservative videographers whose coverage of Black Lives Matter and other protests came under The Intercept’s withering scrutiny.

This past month has occasioned spectacular success, of a sort, for the pugnacious contrarian pundit, an erstwhile leftist journalist-turned-Donald Trump defender who once again is proving his mastery of the right-wing media ecosystem.

Indeed, in a self-perpetuating feedback loop that runs from Twitter to Fox News and back again, Greenwald has managed, like Trump before him, to orchestrate his very own news cycles.

Last year, following his exit from The Intercept, Greenwald admitted to The Daily Beast that Fox News airs its share of “horrific, toxic, damaging, destructive, and bigoted” content. However, he defended his frequent Fox hits, saying, “I have no doubt that some people at the Intercept were upset that I was going on Fox, but I would no sooner allow anyone to dictate to me which shows I can go on than I would allow anyone to censor my opinions.”

And now he is effectively operating as something of a Fox News assignment editor, as indicated by The Daily Beast’s spot check of the frequency with which Greenwald’s online musings on social media and elsewhere, especially his Substack page, have served as the basis for dozens of articles on Fox News’ website.

[RichTBikkies]

Jun 3, 2021 17:36:59 GMT LFC said:

Yeah, just WTF did happen to him? Sold out? Lashing out? Just lost his grip on reality?

DISGUSTING & DANGEROUS,” screamed the banner headline at the bottom of the television screen, just under the blonde-sheathed visage of Fox News’ Laura Ingraham. “GREENWALD BLASTS INTERCEPT FOR SMEARING INGRAHAM GUESTS.”

And so during a recent episode of The Ingraham Angle, Glenn Greenwald—who is so familiar to the top-rated cable channel’s millions of viewers that he requires only a surname—put on a suit and tie in Rio de Janeiro, where he lives, to continue doing what has occupied his energies for much of the past month.

That’s deploying every conceivable platform—from Twitter (where he has 1.6 million followers) to YouTube to Substack to an array of popular conservative websites to the very top of the ziggurat, Rupert Murdoch’s corporate cash cow—to denounce former friends and colleagues at The Intercept, the left-leaning digital news and opinion site he co-founded with Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill in 2013.

Well, the poor child of God has to eat. I suppose.

[LFC]

Glenn is now skipping down the money trail with ... Tucker Carlson? Oh, Glenn. What happened to you? I guess you just figured that selling out wasn't so bad.

Last week, in an appearance on a Mediaite podcast, the journalist Glenn Greenwald came to the defense once again of Fox News’s chief hatemonger, Tucker Carlson. While he rightly accused Carlson of “deliberately inflaming ... dangerous and potentially volatile racial divisions” by “focusing on, say, how Black cops kill white people, and then under-covering when white cops kill Black people,” Greenwald added that Carlson’s “overall ideology” was “frequently misunderstood.”

It was a perfect encapsulation of the two media celebrities’ flourishing partnership. Carlson’s racism is not so disqualifying as to discourage Greenwald from regularly appearing on Tucker Carlson Tonight, where the two faux-populists unite in their reflexive opposition to anything remotely establishmentarian—especially the U.S. government, the Democratic Party, and mainstream media. The mutual benefit is clear: By platforming a decorated journalist once associated with the left, Carlson is implicitly rebutting charges that he’s a right-wing ideologue, while Greenwald gets to burnish his own supposed iconoclasm and raise his profile via the most watched cable news program in the country.

You might even call it a marriage of convenience at this stage, given the events of this week. On Monday, Carlson claimed that he was the subject of a government surveillance program designed to gather damning information on him, with the intention of leaking it to force his show off the air. Carlson said that he owed this discovery to a National Security Agency whistleblower but offered no evidence except his word that his digital communications were being collected. The whistleblower, Carlson said, knew details “that could only come from my texts and emails.” The surveillance orders originated with the Biden administration, Carlson claimed, warning that “spying on opposition journalists is incompatible with democracy.”

Oh, boy. Maybe Glenn snapped over the whole Snowden thing. This is just sad.

McCarthy, who has voted in favor of preserving NSA surveillance authorities, might be dismissed as a cynical opportunist trying to show his support for a right-wing grandee. But Carlson has found an even more important and useful supporter in Greenwald, who famously broke the Edward Snowden revelations. Despite the lack of evidence—something that Greenwald frequently demands from his opponents and which, earlier in his career, he would have demanded of Carlson—Greenwald has embraced the host’s claims, using them as an opportunity to slam some of his favorite targets: security-state-friendly liberals and the cable news channels that hire them. (He also chided other cable networks for not covering the allegations—though CNN did, albeit skeptically.)

For Greenwald, the Carlson story has become another example of the perfidy of an incurious media unwilling to question state power. “We know that the Democratic party and journalism in general has aligned with the CIA, NSA, and the FBI, and has aligned and merged with the security state,” Greenwald told Carlson this week. “And so in response to the report you did, you would think other journalists … would say we want to know whether the NSA is abusing their powers in order to spy on journalists they dislike. Instead, they mocked it.”

In providing journalistic ballast to a story that so far appears to have none, Greenwald has made himself Carlson’s willing partner in a potential lie. Their pairing has found its ultimate synergy in a story that combines Greenwald’s righteous war against state surveillance and the mainstream media with Carlson’s own narcissistic need to place himself at the center of the story. It would be a potentially perilous position for both, if either had anything to fear about their credibility. Instead, together they’re pushing a story into the public consciousness that distorts and misrepresents the true threat of mass government surveillance.

[goldenvalley]

Sometimes I think these folks have crossed over from having actual differences of opinion to simply showing some underlying mental illness that becomes more prominent as they age. I've always thought that about Dreher. Greenwald is looking like that too...he's not being thoughtful, he's lashing out at some real or imagined (or both) persecutor. Tuckums is easier to understand.

[LFC]

According to Glenn Greenwald fighting against COVID vaccine misinformation is now fascism. Here's the setup:

President Biden accused Facebook of "killing people" by allowing what he deems as misinformation on coronavirus vaccines to be shared on the site.

"On COVID misinformation, what’s your message to platforms like Facebook," a reporter asked the president as he was leaving the White House on Friday.

"They’re killing people," Biden responded. "The only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated, and they’re killing people."

Earlier the same day, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki drew criticism after she said the Biden administration is in communication with Facebook to limit "misinformation" on the coronavirus and the vaccine shared on the platform.

"So we're regularly making sure social media platforms are aware of the latest narratives, dangerous to public health that we and many other Americans are seeing across all of social and traditional media," Psaki said. "And we work to engage with them to better understand the enforcement of social media platform policies," Press Secretary Jen Psaki said Friday during a briefing.

Psaki added, "As you all know information travels quite quickly. If it's up there for days and days and days. When people see it, you know, there's, it's hard to put that back in a box, and of course, promoting quality information algorithms, I don't know how they work, but they all do know how they work."

Facebook released a statement Friday appearing to object to Biden’s statement, arguing that the company is actually saving lives, not ending them.

And here are his own words in response:

"The Biden administration is telling Facebook which posts it regards as ‘problematic’ so that Facebook can remove them," journalist Glenn Greenwald tweeted. "This is the union of corporate and state power -- one of the classic hallmarks of fascism -- that the people who spent 5 years babbling about fascism support."

Greenwald added in a lengthy thread: "There is no circumstance -- none -- in which it's acceptable for the White House or any other agency of the government to be providing lists to Facebook of "problematic" content it wants removed, yet's that exactly what Psaki says they're doing."

So now Glenn has gone from a respected journalist to a "spy in ever closet" nutjob to a merchant of death. Nice career trajectory. I suspect his income is rising with each step.

[goldenvalley]

Don't know if the financial gain did it, or whether he was always unreasonable.

[indy]

It's almost as if Greenwald doesn't know that the FDA has been dictating what medically related things you can say since like the early 1900s. The government has, in fact, been doing exactly what Greenwald complains about since then, telling companies exactly which of their misleading or fraudulent medical claims must be removed, and from where.

[MSheridan]

I cannot recall if there was a time I respected Greenwald. It's possible, but if so it was a long time back. Certainly, his fundamental dishonesty was clear enough during the Obama years. But he's hardly the first guy to go down this path and end up at FOX. Remember, a long, long time ago Geraldo Rivera was an idealistic attorney for the Young Lords.

[RichTBikkies]

With the world going on the way it is, it's a common sight to see previously sane people going off their heads. "There, but for the grace of God, go I". We all have feet of clay and invisible character flaws, and the appropriate stress applied at the appropriate intensity can do for us.

[MSheridan]

Jul 20, 2021 8:56:31 GMT RichTBikkies said:

With the world going on the way it is, it's a common sight to see previously sane people going off their heads. "There, but for the grace of God, go I". We all have feet of clay and invisible character flaws, and the appropriate stress applied at the appropriate intensity can do for us.

Very true, although I'm agnostic on Greenwald's previous sanity. Most times I paid attention to him, he was being histrionic, narcissistic, and/or dishonest. So I stopped paying attention. Either he was an idealist back then with personal issues that became far more serious, or it was always a GlennBeckian play for attention. I can remember a time when Alan Dershowitz wasn't a total joke, too.

If it IS mental illness, well, I have far, far more sympathy to extend to people whose decompensation isn't simultaneously profiting them and hurting others.

[LFC]

Chelsea Manning has had an ugly breakup with Greenwald. More and more I get the feeling that Glenn is mentally unstable.

Chelsea Manning, the former U.S. army intel analyst who leaked classified documents to WikiLeaks, unloaded on her one-time ally Glenn Greenwald on Thursday, calling him “greedy” and “unprincipled,” and saying she was “embarrassed for ever considering you a friend.” Greenwald, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and co-founding editor of investigative news site The Intercept, was a longtime advocate for Manning while she was imprisoned for espionage. Manning was freed in 2017; three years later, the once-leftist Greenwald departed The Intercept in a public huff, claiming editors had “censored” an article he’d written on Hunter Biden. He’s been steadily trolling his way to the right ever since, and making bizarre claims about transgender people (Manning is transgender.)

It was during Wednesday night’s floods, Manning said, that she decided not to be afraid of “people that I once considered allies but who have chosen to bash, harass, humiliate, intimidate, and lie to get ahead.” She said she would return Greenwald’s $10,000 donation to her if she could. Greenwald responded roughly an hour later, saying in a tweet thread: “Friendships that depend on political agreement were never ‘friendships,’ just cynical transactions.”

[LFC]

Glenn continues to circle the drain as he embraces the Faux Newsiverse for fun and profit.

DISGUSTING & DANGEROUS,” screamed the banner headline at the bottom of the television screen, just under the blonde-sheathed visage of Fox News’ Laura Ingraham. “GREENWALD BLASTS INTERCEPT FOR SMEARING INGRAHAM GUESTS.”

And so during a recent episode of The Ingraham Angle, Glenn Greenwald—who is so familiar to the top-rated cable channel’s millions of viewers that he requires only a surname—put on a suit and tie in Rio de Janeiro, where he lives, to continue doing what has occupied his energies for much of the past month.

That’s deploying every conceivable platform—from Twitter (where he has 1.6 million followers) to YouTube to Substack to an array of popular conservative websites to the very top of the ziggurat, Rupert Murdoch’s corporate cash cow—to denounce former friends and colleagues at The Intercept, the left-leaning digital news and opinion site he co-founded with Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill in 2013.

“These millennial digital liberal outlets like the Intercept, BuzzFeed, the Huffington Post, so many of them—they think that if you’re a conservative, you’re not really a journalist,” the 54-year-old Greenwald intoned (a tad weirdly, because most of his targets are in their late forties and fifties), while Ingraham could barely contain a gleeful grin. “They think that you’re part of this crypto-fascist movement, that you’re the enemy,” he added—referring to two young conservative videographers whose coverage of Black Lives Matter and other protests came under The Intercept’s withering scrutiny.

This past month has occasioned spectacular success, of a sort, for the pugnacious contrarian pundit, an erstwhile leftist journalist-turned-Donald Trump defender who once again is proving his mastery of the right-wing media ecosystem.

Indeed, in a self-perpetuating feedback loop that runs from Twitter to Fox News and back again, Greenwald has managed, like Trump before him, to orchestrate his very own news cycles.

Last year, following his exit from The Intercept, Greenwald admitted to The Daily Beast that Fox News airs its share of “horrific, toxic, damaging, destructive, and bigoted” content. However, he defended his frequent Fox hits, saying, “I have no doubt that some people at the Intercept were upset that I was going on Fox, but I would no sooner allow anyone to dictate to me which shows I can go on than I would allow anyone to censor my opinions.”

And now he is effectively operating as something of a Fox News assignment editor, as indicated by The Daily Beast’s spot check of the frequency with which Greenwald’s online musings on social media and elsewhere, especially his Substack page, have served as the basis for dozens of articles on Fox News’ website.

[pg]

Ho, hum...Another media personality abandons his/her core principles in favor of attention and money. Sometimes it is within major events (9/11 a great example) that causes a real sea change of opinion. Sometimes, it's simple opportunity and echoing the "common man voices" all too prevalent in today's marketplace of ignorance and a blind need to repeat anything that validates their own confirmation biases.

I remember early on during my national media producer phase, when I alerted people on all sides of the political perspective of a little-known voice. Glenn Beck. He started out entertaining, reasonable (dare I say it? even middle ground) and under-the-radar increased his popularity and reach. Many people called BS on me. And then he came out of his shell to be the RW monster most remember him to be.

Greenwald isn't the first nor the last we'll see to pull a hard right turn. Shoot- I even saw some do the hard left turn, albeit with lesser impact and profit. Turns out that the right extremists attract more listeners and revenue than the lefties. No shock, no awe, just business as usual.

[LFC]

Nov 18, 2021 1:59:22 GMT pg said:

I remember early on during my national media producer phase, when I alerted people on all sides of the political perspective of a little-known voice. Glenn Beck. He started out entertaining, reasonable (dare I say it? even middle ground) and under-the-radar increased his popularity and reach. Many people called BS on me. And then he came out of his shell to be the RW monster most remember him to be.

And then he went anti-Trump for a bit but that didn't pay the bills so he became a right-wing monster again.

[LFC]

I added Dershowitz to the title since he seems to suffer from the same delusions, meltdowns, and screeching about being the only one who will tell the truth. He's still throwing hissy fits. Reading this is just sad. What a way to end your career and public persona.

That segment, and the resulting ridicule, brought Dershowitz to the attention of New Yorker staff writer Isaac Chotiner. And even though Chotiner has the well-earned reputation of systematically dismantling his interview subjects with dry humor, razor-sharp quips, and biting questions, Dersh somehow agreed to chat with him. The conversation went just as one would expect.

And, of course, Dershowitz couldn’t stop talking about the Vineyard.

At one point, the famed attorney declared he was the “most popular speaker” in something called “the Chilmark Library series,” only for Chotiner to deadpan: “I can imagine.” Dershowitz then went on to claim the library first gave him the excuse that his “crowds were too big” as the reason they hadn’t recently booked him, adding that he asked them to limit the crowds.

“Can you imagine if Ed Sullivan had done that with the Beatles? It’s a ridiculous excuse,” Chotiner deadpanned.

Elsewhere, Dershowitz claimed he’s been “besieged with phone calls” from people complaining they’ve been denied the chance to see his speeches. (Of course, the local library director told Chotiner that “not one single person has contacted me to complain that they haven’t had a chance to hear Alan speak.”)

Yet, while all he’s done is air grievances about his lack of speaking invitations, Dersh has repeatedly insisted this isn’t actually about his “cancellation”—it’s about that silent majority of Dershowitz fans.

“I want to make it clear it’s not about me. I have a thick skin. It’s about the other people in Chilmark who want to hear my views, people who come here because they love the culture and they love going to the book fair,” he said. “They love going to the library events, to the community center. Now they can’t hear me at any of those places and see me.”

Still, even after getting the Chotiner treatment, Dersh has pressed on, more determined than ever to tell the world about the horrors of not getting booked for a library speech in the Vineyard.

Appearing on newly minted Newsmax host Greta Van Susteren’s show on Monday evening, the famed lawyer pivoted from talking about the Jan. 6 House committee hearings to the price he’s paid for his brave truth-telling.

“I have been punished severely. I can’t speak at the library at Martha's Vineyard,” he cried as Van Susteren appeared to stifle a yawn. “I have been silenced.”

The following afternoon, Newsmax gave him far more time to complain about his trials and tribulations.

It's so bad that he can't even seem to remember what person the First Amendment is written in. Hint, Alan. It's not the members of an audience.

Moving on to his book, he fumed about being “blackballed” from the island’s Jewish cultural center and book fair. However, he once again insisted, he “has a thick skin” and the real “victims are the citizens of Martha’s Vineyard” who’ve been denied the opportunity to see him.

“They are being deprived of their First Amendment rights,” Dershowitz exclaimed.

[pg]

Jul 20, 2021 6:51:09 GMT MSheridan said:

I cannot recall if there was a time I respected Greenwald. It's possible, but if so it was a long time back. Certainly, his fundamental dishonesty was clear enough during the Obama years. But he's hardly the first guy to go down this path and end up at FOX. Remember, a long, long time ago Geraldo Rivera was an idealistic attorney for the Young Lords.

Me, either. I don't think I ever truly trusted him. Yep. I believe he follows the money trail wherever it takes him. Just as far too many media figures do now and for quite some time. 

[LFC]

"I got that letter today!" And I'm suuuuure it's completely true. Dershowitz is whining and pathetic. Here's a piece of advice for ya', Al. If you don't like the way people treat you, maybe don't whine about it on Newsmax.