When Glenn Greenwald Attacks
Greenwald attacked me on Twitter but botched it so badly he ran off without a fight.
by Ben Cohen
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
Central to the Alt Left/Alt Right schtick is an obsession with the evil “Establishment Dems”. Rachel Maddow, once a friend of Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi’s, is a prominent target mostly because she dared report on Russia’s blatant attempt to subvert a US election and the Kremlins extremely shady ties to Donald Trump. Greenwald and Taibbi believe this was all a big DNC/corporate Democrat inspired hoax, and have expended a truly extraordinary amount of energy trying to prove it.
In their world view, corporate liberals are obsessed with war, are mouthpieces of The Deep State, and are now so “Woke” that they have abandoned critical thinking and objectivity. Of course Greenwald/Taibbi and their ilk are the only remaining “independent” journalists bravely speaking out against the neoliberal groupthink.
Over the weekend, Maddow tweeted out the statement of former Ambassador Michael McFaul, who claimed on Maddow’s show that “one difference between Putin and Hitler is that Hitler didn’t kill ethnic Germans, German-speaking people. Putin slaughters the very people he said he has come to liberate”.
Taibbi and his fellow truth teller Glenn Greenwald were all over this having found incontrovertible evidence that Maddow was a warmongering neoliberal shill:
Why anyone would find it “disgusting” or “dumb” that you would compare a brutal dictator responsible for killing hundreds of thousands of people with another brutal dictator responsible for even more people is perplexing to say the least. There are stunning historic parallels between the two men, and to pretend otherwise is to deny what is happening to innocent Ukrainians on live television.
Either way, Maddow later apologized for the technical inaccuracies of her guest’s statement and took the tweet down:
Given the hysterical response from Greenwald, I tweeted to Taibbi that he might want to think twice before citing him as a credible source for, well, anything:
Greenwald, who blocked me on Twitter years ago, saw this, unblocked me, and spent the next hour attacking me in what would turn out to be a spectacular self own.
The dates, Glenn. The dates…
Here’s how Greenwald responded to the tweet he saw on Taibbi’s timeline:
And my response:
Greenwald began mocking The Banter and the collapse of our previous incarnation, The Daily Banter:
It is important to note that Greenwald took the time to trawl through years of posts to find an article I published in May of 2019 referencing an interview I did with journalist Simon Owens on the demise of The Daily Banter. Posting this “gotcha” to his audience of 1.7 million Twitter followers, Greenwald didn’t bother checking the date of the article to match his claim that The Daily Banter “collapsed with Trump gone”. I responded:
Trump of course left office in 2020.
Greenwald only had to read the headline of article he cited to avoid making this schoolboy error:
The entire interview was about Facebook’s drastic newsfeed algorithm change that killed our traffic, and their decision to cut off ad revenue to politics sites in 2017/18. Not Donald Trump, who was very much present during that time given he was president of the United States.
After tweeting this back to Greenwald, he stopped responding and blocked me on Twitter (again).
A sad spectacle
It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad to watch someone like Greenwald humiliate himself like this over and over again. While the loss of The Daily Banter was deeply painful for me, I have never defined my self worth by the number of readers we have or the industry recognition we’ve attained over the years. For Greenwald though, this is everything. Pulitzer prizes, a huge Twitter following, a highly lucrative gig with a billionaire tech mogul — Greenwald loves it. And if you don’t have it, he’ll be sure to remind you that he has more followers than you do.
While Greenwald did win a Pulitzer eight years ago, he now promotes his work on Tucker Carlson’s conspiracy filled propaganda show, takes money from a Canadian spam site infested with White Nationalists, and is so lazy that he can’t be bothered to do even the most basic of fact checking.
Greenwald has never been the journalist he believes he is, but the current version of him is beyond parody. Greenwald, it should be noted, went so far off the rails that his own site refused to publish his propaganda. This of course lead to him founding a newsletter where his work is immune to any sort of factchecking or feedback. The results have been so spectacularly awful that no one outside of Tucker Carlson’s audience now sees him as a credible journalist — or even a decent human being.
“I’m terrified of you,” former friend and ally Chelsea Manning wrote to him on Twitter a few months ago. “You’re greedy, unprincipled, and I’m embarrassed for ever considering you a friend”.
Personally, I think Manning was being charitable. But then Greenwald has more Twitter followers than me, so what do I know?
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There’s No Way In Hell Trump Was Tough On Russia
Things are bad right now, but they could be a hell of a lot worse.
by Bob Cesca
WASHINGTON, DC – The Russian military used thermobaric rockets, reportedly fired from TOS-1A launchers, to destroy a maternity hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine this week. The latest reports from Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelinskyy indicate babies buried in rubble and pregnant women being hauled away on stretchers. There have been innumerable atrocities in this war so far, but this has to be the most barbaric and unforgivable attack by Vladimir Putin to date.
Making matters worse, when thermobaric rockets explode, they do so with greater heat than other rockets by design, as if anyone needs hotter explosions to destroy hospitals loaded with newborn babies.
But at least Putin’s not calling Tucker Carlson a racist, right?
I guess this is what happens when the world pushes back against Putin, isolating and humiliating him. Now imagine what would happen if an American fighter pilot or surface-to-air missile site enforcing a no-fly zone shot down a Russian aircraft over Ukrainian soil – which, to Putin, constitutes ancestral Russian soil…
To continue reading, please go here.
Y’know, Ive long been concerned by the seemingly sudden flip to the hard right by previously legit journalists to a pathetic duck sucking kkkristian nationalism.
Do we have any psychologists who can explain how/why it happens?
Unless it’s just about money?
Really is amazing how the lure or striving for money can make people become so twisted. Evidence: greenwood, Taibbi, trump and 90% of the republican party and it’s base. I guess we can’t leave out their deeply ingrained racism.