Wasn't Glenn Greenwald a DU favorite, years ago? (Or months?)

[Archae]

Just wondering, he sure does sound like a real asshole now.

Glenn Greenwald grossly misfires in botched attempt to smear an intern

Brenna Smith, an investigations intern at USA Today, revealed over the weekend that various defendants awaiting trial for their role in the January 6 insurgency at the US Capitol are resorting to underhanded tactics to get around tech platforms' strict rules against transferring money to violent extremists. Smith and her colleagues—veteran reporters Jessica Guynn and Will Carless—conducted a meticulous investigation on a matter of great public interest. But no good deed goes unpunished. Not on Twitter.

"Congratulations on using your new journalistic platform to try to pressure tech companies to terminate the ability of impoverished criminal defendants to raise money for their legal defense from online donations," tweeted Glenn Greenwald, a pundit and frequent Tucker Carlson guest, directing his ire squarely at the young female intern, Brenna Smith, rather than at the ideas presented in her piece.

Greenwald offers no evidence that these defendants are indigent, as opposed to merely cheap, but let's assume they're unable to afford lawyers. If so, that's what public defenders are for. The right to counsel doesn't entitle you to ignore the terms of service set by private companies. There's no constitutional right to PayPal.

https://www.rawstory.com/glenn-greenwald/

[uponit7771]

1. That ended Circa 2015, seems like decades ago

[hlthe2b]

2. Years ago, maybe. His a'hole pro-Trump, anti-Democrat turn is well known now, I think.

[Archae]

4. Since I don't follow Greenwald, it's not well known to me...

What happened, specifically?

Did he fall victim to the Dark Side of the Force?

[hlthe2b]

6. I detest him now and really consider him a waste of breath. When someone shows you who they

truly ARE, BELIEVE THEM. And I do.

I'll leave it to someone else to cite a litany of his a'hole turns.

[joshcryer]

11. He was always a contrarian.

He was one of Obama's biggest detractors and that is in part why he was beloved around here. Also this site had a lot of Russian shills but when they broke off to that other site, Tree something I think I can't remember, they stopped coming here. It helps that the site has supported stringent "Support Democrats" role since the 2016 loss, and the jury system is effective at enforcing it.

He has me blocked on Twitter so I can't see his posts (which is more blessing than a curse honestly). I went down the rabbit hole with him the other day and he was still spouting Hunter Biden laptop nonsense even though he got hoodwinked into it and that whole setup was faked.

[blogslug]

42. I disagree with part of what you said

Greenwald was lauded here because of his anti-Iraq war/Bush writings. He quickly fell out of grace when he started shitting on Obama and then began spouting bullshit, denying Russian involvement in the 2016-2020 elections. He's been terrible for years.

[joshcryer]

52. I would disagree with that.

In 2012 Obama was being shit on by Greenwald as many other "liberal" authors would do. It was, simply, being against the mainstream. He also put a lot of effort into shitting on Hillary, Then as soon as Trump got elected, instead of being liberal and shitting on the literal daily influx of Trump bullshit, he went full on against the media, and rejected any topics that put Trump in a bad light.

Nevermind that he deleted every single one of his posts a few years ago and is of the position that he can delete them at whim. I won that one as far as I know, because those posts no longer exist on the internet.

[blogslug]

53. But!

You wrote that his anti-Obama blatherings were the reason why he was favored here. That is not how he first came to prominence on DU - it was his writings against Bush and the Iraq war.

Greenwald sucking came later, beginning with the great DU primary wars of 2008.

[hlthe2b]

12. In a nutshell, he hates Biden, loves Putin & never fails to defend Trump, hates Democratic party

which he lumps into "the establishment," but really includes the entire party in that. Was all about defending Trump/Putin and blaming Dems for "Russia investigation."

He drank the Koolaid, prepared the Koolaid, and wants progressives to pay to read his prepared "Koolaid."

Oh and he's a nasty, foul, arrogant, egotistical a'hole.

So, that's a start. Now, I need to gargle with Listerine to get that a'hole's name off my tongue.

[Thomas Hurt]

3. When criminal defendant's gain the constitutional right to grift for their defense atty bills...

[TheRealNorth]

5. My guess is the Russians got something on him....

So he sings whatever his Russian handlers tell him to.

[Hortensis]

14. I've wondered also. Some just serve Russia against the U.S. because

they want to betray, or in bizarre, clueless idealism to serve, seeing it as a superior form of government. Or something.

Some of the stories really make you shake your head. The things people do! But of course that just hands the FSB ready-compromised assets who put the choke collars on themselves.

[Dem4Life1102]

7. Never liked him myself

or Matt Taibbi. Often wondered why others did.

[grantcart]

47. +1

[Hortensis]

51. They were vulnerable to the psych ops subversion that both parties,

Republicans AND Democrats, were all corrupt.

That delusion created confusing woods for the Repubs to hide their behaviors in (no, the Democrats did it!) and weakened belief in both the Democratic Party and in the people's ability to change anything by voting.

The Republicans, foreign enemies and domestic opponents have all been doing this with a great deal of success for decades.

[Downtown Hound]

8. Maybe at some point but longer than a few years ago

He seems to be one of those former progressives that fell down the Trump rabbit hole for whatever reason. He's been a Trump butt licker for quite some time now.

[BlueLucy]

9. Greenwald's fans all left to JPR. nt

[JI7]

10. Mostly among the JPR forum people who ended up supporting Trump

[timber84]

13. He blocked me last night.

Proud moment personally.

[Cha]

19. Congrats!

[struggle4progress]

15. He's an anti-government libertarian. When Obama was elected,

GG switched from blaming W for W's crimes to blaming Obama for W's crimes

[ecstatic]

16. He was. I never liked him, but there was a time when a contingent of

DUers used Glenn Greenwald, Snowden, etc to attack President Obama. It was relentless, but I think most of those individuals are gone now.

[LetMyPeopleVote]

17. Greenwald has been a jerk for a while

[Cha]

18. Greenwald hated President Obama &

called us "Obamabots".

I always thought he was a Gaslighting Asshole.

[PTWB]

20. No

[Celerity]

21. Greenwald has morphed into a real POS over the years nt

[The Magistrate]

22. Always Was One, Ma'am

There was a time people kept posting Alex Jones' 'Prisonplanet' links here. Just because someone attacked Bush the Lesser did not make him either rational, or even useful. Greenwald was always a vituperative and ignorant fool. Just a contrarian twit, who, again like Jones, shifted from attacking Bush to attacking Obama without missing a beat, like the Party orator at close of Hate Week in 1984.

[Celerity]

23. Rachel Maddow didn't seem to think that was the case (not that it proves anything, I shall admit)

https://us.macmillan.com/tradebooksforcourses/academictrade/9781250013835/withlibertyandjusticeforsome

"Glenn Greenwald is not just the American Left's most fearless political commentator; his fearlessness is such that he has shifted the expectations for everyone else, too. His rock-ribbed principles and absolute disregard for partisan favor have made U.S. political discourse edgier, more confrontational, and much, much better."

[The Magistrate]

24. Everyone Makes Mistakes, Ma'am

Even Ms. Maddow on occasion. That one does not affect my view she is far and away the best commentator to be found on a television.

[Celerity]

25. I fully admit that I have not done a tremendous amount of research on him pre Obama.

Or post Obama for that matter, lol.

He seems to too often be contrarian for contrarianism's sake, and I think has completely jumped the shark at this stage of the game.

[Downtown Hound]

29. That book was released in 2012

So I'm guessing that's when Ms. Maddow's comment was made. That's long before Greenwald decided he really liked the smell of Trump's ass.

[Celerity]

30. We were talking about the entirely of his career. I said he morphed into a POS, and The Magistrate

said he always was a POS, from the start of his public career. That is why I gave an older example, which failed to change his mind.

[TwilightZone]

27. Agreed. He's been a hack since his early days at Salon.

His fact-checking there was so poor that his articles would often end up with multiple post-publication "UPDATES" (always breathless and in capital letters) that were, in fact, corrections.

[kcr]

26. He sure had his fans

They mostly left DU or are smart enough to keep their fandom to themselves now.

[Celerity]

31. Pre Obama (I see you are a 20 year member) was he close to universally admired here?

Or at least overwhelmingly (say 80, 90%)?

[muriel_volestrangler]

37. Not overwhelmingly - he really became conspicuous during the Snowden affair

which was highly divisive on DU. Many supported the US government, with Obama in charge, whatever it did during that (the most egregious act probably being forcing the jet of President Evo Morales to land in Austria so it could be searched to show Snowden was not using it to escape from Russia; the British government detained Greenwald's partner at Heathrow under the Terrorism Act, because he had encrypted data Snowden had taken from the US). Some, and I was one of them, thought that Snowden had a point about overreach of US government surveillance of Americans and world leaders, whether or not a Democrat was in charge when he exposed it, and so accepted Greenwald's actions and writing on it at the time. You didn't have to be a complete contrarian to take that stance. Greenwald wrote frequently for The Guardian up to 2014.

Pre-Obama, I suspect Greenwald was seldom mentioned here. If he was, I suspect he was quoted and accepted without much controversy, since his general stance was "government surveillance is too much", which DU is fine with if a Republican is in charge. The problem with Greenwald is that he stopped saying that when Trump came along - suddenly, he thought Trump was "on the side of the people". Which is stupid and a lie.

[Azathoth]

45. Actually, it was the Chelsea Manning affair that first got him attention

Before that, Greenwald had been known for reporting on stuff like Bush's FISA court abuses.

Manning was a malcontent who wanted to embarrass the US and punish it for being in Iraq, so she used her security clearance to download hundreds of thousands of classified diplomatic cables and then leaked them to Assange. Greenwald dived in and became Manning's biggest defender. His antics justifying a complete undermining of the USA's diplomatic capabilities were, of course, much celebrated by folks who had spent years claiming that the US was evil because it used military force rather than diplomacy.

The Manning affair is what turned Greenwald into a temporary DU icon, and it's why Snowden went to him.

[muriel_volestrangler]

46. Manning exposed war crimes; everyone should have been "malcontent" about that

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War_documents_leak

But that does sound right that Greenwald would have been mentioned here then.

[Celerity]

50. Thank you for your reply. It helped a lot.

Cheers

[MineralMan]

28. Not a friend of mine...

Just saying...

[Stinky The Clown]

32. Some of us had little use for him even back then.

[Sugarcoated]

33. He's a petulant whiner

[Hekate]

34. I was never enamored of the guy, but he certainly had a fan club here for awhile...

I kept pointing out that everyone he “befriended” in a high profile manner ended up in prison or in exile, and that’s not a good record. I appeared to me that he didn’t just write about these folks, but encouraged them in their consequential behavior, which they came to regret and which cannot be undone.

[dansolo]

35. He was always a piece of shit

His notoriety came from Edward Snowden, who had no problems with the government surveillance under Bush. Too many people thought of Snowden as a heroic whistleblower, as opposed to the hypocritical traitor he really was.

[betsuni]

36. When it was popular with some to be pro-Russia, anti-America (meaning anti-Democratic Party).

I'd read his hysterical articles about government surveillance under the Obama administration and it was always actually something from the Bush administration. Not a journalist. He'd throw words and words and words and misinformation and hoped some of it stuck to the wall. Maybe a long long time ago he used to be somewhat normal.

[honest.abe]

38. Never trusted that guy.

He's not on our side... probably never was.

[brooklynite]

39. So was Cenk Uygur...

So was Julian Assange...

So was Joe Rogan...

[Calista241]

40. Yeah, Greenwald was strongly anti-W Bush and Iraq war.

I vaguely recall that he moved to South America to get away from Repub stalkers or something like that. He was mentioned in the same breath as Wikileaks and Bradley Manning when they released the helicopter footage of the US Army killing a journalist traveling with insurgents. Greenwald wrote a number of articles advocating for charging W Bush with war crimes.

And damn, Wikileaks used to be widely lauded / worshipped here on DU.

[MineralMan]

41. I always got him and Manny Goldstein mixed up.

[Azathoth]

43. Greenwald always played well to those with an agenda

He was very popular with the part of the Left that spent decades minimizing the USSR, and later Russia's, misdeeds while condemning every single action the US took as genocidal imperialism.

He only became persona non grata in some leftist circles when his politics evolved into a pure anti-Democratic Party agenda.

[dalton99a]

44. A journalist who is allergic to any criticism of Trump or Putin

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

48. Years ago and he was an asshole back then in my opinion

Not sure why he was popular here though I suspect many who favored him were right wing sock puppets.

[Demsrule86]

49. I was never a fan...can't stand him.