Glenn Greenwald: Black Lives Don't Matter When There Are Democrats To Blame

[Celerity]

This gets crazier than usual. Even for Greenwald.

https://thebanter.substack.com/p/glenn-greenwald-black-lives-dont



After Bernie Sanders suspended his campaign, I more or less stopped paying attention to Glenn Greenwald. He had spent just about every waking moment of the last six years trying to poison the discourse and while he had succeeded in 2016, he had failed in 2020. There was not going to be a long, drawn out and damaging primary and, so far, there has been no significant split on the left. Except maybe in activist Twitter land which is divided between “Trump has got to go” and “four more years of Trump is worth it.” Greenwald and the rest of his anti-Democrat cohort occasionally darken my twitter feed and I’ll have something less than polite to say about them, but, mostly, I focus on Trump and his party of white nationalist fascists. But after almost three weeks of protests that are affecting real change, I thought I might pop on over and see what kind of crap good ol’ Glenn was spewing. There was zero chance Greenwald would support the protests without additional commentary because they are hurting Trump, badly.

Therefore, I guessed that instead of supporting anti-police brutality, Glenn would be more concerned with how Democrats are to blame for...something. It’s important to keep in mind that Greenwald presents himself as a champion of liberty. In reality, he behaves more like a right-leaning libertarian who doesn’t actually say he’s a right-leaning libertarian. His schtick is to attack Democrats as being the enemy of everything good in the world while ignoring the literal white nationalist fascism of Republicans. It’s a super transparent ruse that anyone not blinded by hatred of the Democratic Party can see through. But hate makes a lot of people easy to dupe (see, Republican Party, entire base of) so he still has quite the following. Even so, as a libertarian, one would think Greenwald would be pretty gung-ho about the protests. Police brutality is so anathema to libertarianism that even Rand Paul, one of the most loathsome Trump toadies in the Senate, is pushing a police reform bill. But Greenwald has very little interest in holding the police accountable. The real bad guys in the ongoing protests are Democrats.

Black Lives Don’t Matter When There Are Democrats To Blame

From the day Floyd was killed and moving through the following weeks, Greenwald’s tweets paint a depressing picture of a person paying lip service to the idea that the police need to be reigned in while searching for a narrative that paints Democrats as the primary villains. Greenwald occasionally struggles to find the right way to bash Democrats and stays relatively quiet until he figures it out. For instance, after his “Russiagate is a hoax” narrative blew up in his face, he was completely silent for a full week before flying into a fit of rage at, of course, Democrats. In this same vein, Greenwald doesn’t really say too much about Floyd, the police, or the protests for the first week or so. There are twice as many tweets about animal cruelty as there are about the protests and only a few of the those tweets are about the police themselves or their rapidly escalating violence. Most of them are about how you can’t trust Democrats or the press. There are, as always, very few tweets about Trump and they have to do with his threats to send in the military (which Glenn, to his credit, opposes). The overwhelming balance is about how awful Democrats are. There are but a handful discussing the actual point of the protests, i.e. black lives mattering.

I'd like to take a moment to point out that Glenn Greenwald is a regular guest on Tucker Carlson’s white nationalist power hour. Allegedly, he does this because his voice is being “suppressed” by the mean ol’ mainstream media — a weird claim given he runs a popular website lavishly funded by billionaire Peter Omidyar. Regardless, the fact that Greenwald is so comfortable with Tucker Carlson, Fox News’s premiere racist, strongly suggests that he doesn’t care all that much about George Floyd or the violence visited on black communities. Unless he can blame it on Democrats, that is. None of this surprised me in the least. Greenwald has never been an ally to anyone but rich white men. That’s what it means to be a libertarian. That’s why Greenwald’s arguments always seem to find a way to avoid criticizing Trump and the GOP while undermining their opposition. I was surprised, however, by the mendacity of the narrative he eventually stumbled onto in order to help Republicans: Democrats, healthcare experts, and the press (who all just so happen to also be targets of Trump) are Covid-19 hypocrites for not condemning the BLM protests. Strap yourself in, this gets crazier than usual. Even for Greenwald.

Everyone Is A Hypocrite! Except Me

My guess is that Greenwald noticed that the protests were resonating a little too much with his audience. There’s an awful lot of younger white people showing up to stand with black people — enough that the police are becoming less vigorous with their beatings. America shrugs at the brutalization of black protesters but it’s a different story when fresh-faced Sally gets a baton upside the head for holding a sign. Repeating over and over that Democrats are bad for aligning themselves with protests that most of the country, including a rather significant number of Republicans, are on board with wasn’t going to cut it. Time to find something new. And he certainly did:

Link to tweet

snip

[UTUSN]

1. GREENWALD and Van JONES both rub me the wrong way.

[The Magistrate]

2. Cold But Fair, Ma'am

Right libertarians are the scum of the earth, and Greenwald has never been anything else.

[SouthernCal_Dem]

7. I'm thinking back to 2013...

It's really a shame that he was able to fool so many people back then.

It took almost 7 years for most people to finally realize he was a fraud.

His goal 7 years ago was the same as it is today: get as many Republicans elected as possible.

[still_one]

3. I know now who Greenwald reminds me of

[Grokenstein]

4. "because his voice is being 'suppressed' by the mean ol' mainstream media"

https://thenib.com/silenced/

I am sooooo old, I remember when Greenwald was sane.

[herding cats]

5. He's not insane at all.

He's an opportunistic jerk whose exploited people he could con with his lies and bullshit. Then he turned those same people into something profitable for him. I've seen better than him come and go over the years. Humorously, they all end up on FOX news before it's over.

Excellent comic to depict his shtick. 👍

[Gothmog]

6. Does anyone pay attention to Greenwald and if so whY??

I stopped paying attention to this pretend journalist a long time ago

[Scurrilous]

8. K&R