Thread by @DavidNeiwert

40) Here’s the essence of Hale’s case:

41) Hale’s case attracted media attention. He began hiring lawyers to assist him in his legal battle – notably, he seemed to have a thing about hiring _Jewish_ lawyers specifically. The first attorney he hired was none other than Alan Dershowitz.

jta.org/1999/02/18/lif…

42) However, Hale soon discovered that Dershowitz’s fees were extraordinarily high, so he dropped him and turned to the services of another Jewish attorney, Robert Herman of the St. Louis firm Schwartz, Herman and Davidson.


dailyegyptian.com/40929/archives…

43) Eventually he hired a young hotshot Jewish lawyer from New York to spearhead his legal challenge. Hale liked to trot this young man out for the press as proof (for dumb reporters who hadn’t bothered to crack open a Klassen text) he didn’t hate Jews. His name was @ggreenwald.

44) Yes, that Glenn Greenwald. As most of us know now, @ggreenwald has a track record of defending the civil liberties of even the most questionable of cases, and they didn’t come more questionable than Matt Hale. In any event, this case launched his legal career and ended it.

45) From a purely abstract and legalistic standpoint, it’s possible to make a case, as Greenwald has, for a Jewish attorney to defend the civil rights of a militaristic anti-Semite and neo-Nazi. And from the first news story I read about his involvement, I understood this.

46) The ethical case, however, is not so clear. After all, Hale’s group was primarily engaged in the business of depriving minorities – particularly blacks and Jews – of their civil rights through hate crimes, threats, and intimidation. They saw this as one of their own rights.

47) So, from where I sat in Montana, spending time with the frightened victims of WCOTC thugs, someone who was defending their ability to use the levers of the legal system essentially was defending their “right” to deprive other people, vulnerable people, of theirs.

48) More to the point, in a world in which there are myriad opportunities to defend genuinely needy, innocent people being wrongly deprived of their civil rights, I struggled to understand why any humane attorney would devote their efforts to defending neo-Nazis’ rights.

49) The most disturbing aspect of Greenwald’s advocacy on Hale’s behalf, however, involved the viciousness with which he attacked Hale’s critics, as well as the strange and frankly dishonest twists of logic and rhetoric he deployed. It went well beyond the usual legal advocacy.

50) Hale’s legal case wound through the state bar’s appeals process. He had two more hearings before the bar. On June 30, the second and final appeal was rejected. Hale had also looked into getting a license through the Montana bar but couldn’t. He lost.

casetext.com/case/hale-v-co…

51) Two days later, July 2, his second-in-command – a hotheaded young man named Benjamin Smith, 21, whom Hale had just named “Creator of the Month” – went on a murder rampage. He first took drive-by shots at Orthodox Jews in Chicago’s West Rogers Park neighborhood, wounding nine.

52) Next he drove to Skokie, where he encountered a black man walking with two of his children outside his home. The man, as it happened, was former Northwestern University basketball coach Ricky Birdsong. Smith shot and killed him in front of his children.

53) Smith left Skokie and shot at an Asian-American couple but missed. The next day, he drove through Urbana, Springfield, and Decatur, wounding two more black men and an Asian man. In Bloomington, Ind., he murdered Won-Joon Yoon, a 26-year-old Korean student entering his church.

54) Smith also shot at but missed about nine other people. Police soon tracked him down back in Illinois on July 4. After a high-speed chase, he shot himself in the head and crashed his car into a metal pole. Still alive, he shot himself once more in the chest, finishing the job.

55) In Evanston that week, a public memorial provided an opportunity for all of the victims of Smith’s rampage to mourn. There is an annual race held to this day in Evanston in Ricky Byrdsong’s memory.

cityofevanston.org/Home/Component…

56) A few months later, the Center for Constitutional Rights led a lawsuit filed on behalf of the victims against Matt Hale and WCOTC. Here’s the original story published in the April 6, 2000, edition of American Lawyer.

57) Take note of Greenwald’s comments. It’s common to see some hyperbole on a defendant’s behalf in such cases. What’s not common is talk like this: "I find that the people behind these lawsuits are truly so odious and repugnant, that creates its own motivation for me."

58) Also, note how Greenwald bandies the phrase “guilt by association” to describe Matt Hale’s culpability in the rampage. Many of Glenn’s critics will become accustomed to hearing the same phrase, abused in exactly the same fashion, in the years ahead.

59) He was also interviewed for an August 2000 Los Angeles Times piece describing how civil-rights groups were using civil courts to bankrupt hate groups. Greenwald was quoted thus:

articles.latimes.com/2000/aug/22/ne…

60) There are a number of issues here WRT Greenwald's truthfulness. First, in fact, it shortly emerged that not only had Hale just given Smith his group’s top award, he had spent 16 hours on the phone with Smith in the two weeks before the rampage.



articles.chicagotribune.com/1999-07-25/new…

61) Even more significant is Greenwald’s view that the standard tactics used by the SPLC and other civil-rights groups to bankrupt hate groups that actively deprive minorities of their civil rights (both via advocacy and action) via the civil process is “an abuse of the courts.”

62) Finally, doesn’t anyone else find it striking that, not only is Greenwald using such inflammatory language here, but he’s actively attacking civil-rights orgs, while angrily identifying with his clients: “how desperate they are to stop us”? Ask the Byrdsong family about that.

63) In his subsequent attempts to help Hale get his law license, Greenwald’s rhetoric was similarly over the top, as in this lawsuit before the Illinois Supreme Court in 2001 (which, unsurprisingly, failed badly):

web.archive.org/web/2008040920…

64) Eventually, Greenwald ran afoul of the courts on ethical grounds, when he recorded interviews with witnesses in the lawsuit brought by one of Ben Smith’s victims without their knowledge or permission.


leagle.com/decision/20011…

65) “The magistrate judge granted both motions, finding defense counsel's conduct unethical under two separate rules: Local Rule 83.58.4(a)(4), prohibiting ‘dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation;’ ..."

"... and Local Rule 83.54.4, stating ‘a lawyer shall not ... use methods of obtaining evidence that violate the legal rights of [another] person.’”

66) Hale explicitly depicted Smith’s “free speech martyrdom” as a good thing. Indeed, here’s how Matt Hale was quoted in a July 2000 Peoria Journal Star article examining the effects of Smith’s murder spree, headlined “Hate Changing Us in Good, Bad Ways.”

67) In the meantime, an Oregon church called Te-Te-Ma Truth Foundation, based in Ashland, which had before copyrighted the named Church of the Creator for their multiple congregations, sued Hale’s organization in federal court for trademark violation.


chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-20…

68) Hale initially won that lawsuit: District Judge Joan H. Lefkow dismissed the trademark case in 2002. However, an appeals court reversed her decision, forcing her to order Hale to remove the World Church’s name from its websites and literature.

69) Judge Lefkow became the early victim of what we now think of as a “troll storm.” White supremacist radio host Hal Turner said she was “worthy of being killed” … “it wouldn't be legal, but in my opinion it wouldn't be wrong." Photos of her home were posted on the web.

70) The whole enterprise blew up for good on January 8, 2003, when Matt Hale was arrested for conspiring to murder Judge Lefkow. An informant had assembled a collection of video and audio evidence. He was convicted in April 2004.

nytimes.com/2003/01/09/us/…

71) While Hale was awaiting sentencing, on Feb. 28, 2005, a man entered Judge Lefkow’s home and murdered her mother and her husband. Initially assumed to be related to the Hale case, it turned out to be a man angry over another case.


nytimes.com/2005/03/02/us/…

72) Hale’s allies on the Web and elsewhere celebrated. “I can barely contain my glee,” one of them wrote.

chicagotribune.com/news/nationwor…

73) Matthew Hale was handed a 40-year prison sentence a few weeks later. The judge called it an “extreme, egregious attack on the rule of law.” Hale called it “a horrible miscarriage of justice.”

chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-20…

74) Greenwald concurred, telling the New York Times that Hale had been “wrongly convicted.”

That interview occurred when it emerged that Hale had attempted to send a coded message of some kind through Greenwald via his mother. He denied he had delivered it.


nytimes.com/2005/03/09/us/…

75) The Church of the Creator promptly fell into complete disarray.


splcenter.org/fighting-hate/…

76) In Montana, one key member who happened to have possession of the stock of Klassen books that Rudy Stanko had originally obtained decided to defect. He sold them all, $41,000 worth, to the Montana Human Rights Network for $300.

missoulian.com/news/state-and…

77) As often happens with such orgs when they begin to decay, the WCOTC continued to rack up an impressive and disturbing record of hate-fueled violence.


adl.org/news/article/t…

78) Now, as someone who tracked the WCOTC carefully due to their presence in the Northwest, I was familiar with most of this information at the time. As I said, though I understood Greenwald’s reasons for taking on Hale, I had real issues with how he went about it.

79) So I was surprised in a good way by much of what I began reading at Greenwald’s blog, Unclaimed Territory, in fall of 2005. It was smart, thoughtful, and quite insightful about what he rightly saw as an executive power grab in the wake of the 9/11 tragedy.

80) I began citing it favorably at my own blog, Orcinus, which at that point was also pretty well established. One of the first times I did so, in fact, was to defend him for having taken on Hale as a client, with which critics tried to smear him.

dneiwert.blogspot.com/2006/02/conser…

81) There were stumbles – such as his now-infamous (and disavowed) post describing the “parade of evils caused by illegal immigration” – that harkened back to my earlier concerns about his work. The disavowal is also less than persuasive.


glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2005/11/gop-fi…

82) I also was an admirer of Greenwald’s terrific 2006 book “How Would A Patriot Act? Defending American Values from a President Run Amok.” Having just wrapped up my study of the Japanese American internment, I wrote a number of posts concurring with its thesis.

83) I finally met Glenn in person at the 2007 Yearly Kos gathering in Chicago, the year before it was renamed to Netroots Nation. We really only had a brief conversation, and so even though I was bursting with questions for him, I never got to ask them.

84) Questions like:

Do you have any regrets about everything that went down around having Matthew Hale as a client?

85) Like:

Did it ever bother you that the organization whose rights (not altogether clear in any event, since you lost all the rulings on his law license denial) you devoted your expertise to defending was itself in the business of depriving minorities of their civil rights?

86) Like:

Did it ever bother you that by trying to make it possible for Hale to practice law, you were actively assisting WCOTC’s explicit efforts to become part of the mainstream – that is, normalizing them?

87) Like:

Do you still believe using the civil courts to bankrupt hate groups for their followers’ criminal acts, as the SPLC, Center for New Community, Center for Constitutional Rights, and many others do, is an abuse of the system?

88) I continued to cite Greenwald’s work quite bit over the years anyway. But beginning in the fall of 2007, as he increasingly promoted the presidential candidacy of Rep. Ron Paul, I pointed out Paul’s long record of dalliances with the far right.

dneiwert.blogspot.com/2007/11/ron-pa…

89) My then-blog partner Sara Robinson and I began publishing a series of posts about Ron Paul and this history. It culminated with a post detailing the long legislative record of Paul’s extremism in Congress – some 161 bills, all linked.

dneiwert.blogspot.com/2007/11/ron-pa…

90) A couple of days later, Greenwald attacked me at Salon. It opens: “I’m not trying to be Ron Paul’s advocate, but still, outright distortions and smears are distortions and smears.”

salon.com/2007/11/12/pau…

91) I responded the next day, pointing out that those “distortions and smears” were comprised of a laundry list of legislation with links. Also known as cold dry facts.


dneiwert.blogspot.com/2007/11/of-sme…

92) In one of his updates, Greenwald countered with his favorite phrase that he doesn't actually understand or else intentionally abuses.

93) As I pointed out, that’s not how “guilt by association” works – anymore than you can dismiss Matt Hale’s ties to Ben Smith’s rampage by waving that phrase about. In order to be a fallacy, the association must be irrelevant.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associati…

94) Before signing off, I offered one more missive, which Glenn sniffed at and dismissed.


dneiwert.blogspot.com/2007/11/dark-s…

95) At this point, it had become manifestly clear to me that Greenwald has an immense blind spot – an inexplicable one, really – when it comes to far-right extremism and its spread into the mainstream, and the toxic effects of that spread.

96) This isn’t a matter of whether Greenwald is a racist or an extremist or an anti-Semite or anything like that. I don’t believe he is, even remotely. I’m glad I defended him initially.

97) I just believe his sort of principled rigidity on free-speech issues blinds him to the real-world effects of fascism – particularly how it manipulates free-speech principles in order to destroy them. Fascists use people like Greenwald to leave a trail of wreckage.

98) It’s not about whether or not he’s racist – which, after all, would indeed make the whole issue one of guilt by association. That’s not the point of all this. Nor do I believe for a moment that he is.

99) No, this is a question of judgment: If you’re so short-sighted that you can’t see how your ethical choices wind up enabling harmful behavior, then exactly how astute is your judgment in any event?

100) It’s not guilt by association, it’s the guilt _of_ association: People in responsible mainstream positions who lend legitimacy to people from far-right hate groups – whether Klansmen, skinheads, neo-Nazis, or militiamen – are exercising profoundly poor judgment.

101) Lending them that legitimacy not only normalizes them, it empowers them. It helps fuel the twisted psychology of the far right that inevitably, like a law of physics itself, produces violent horrors and ruptured communities. Ask the folks in Billings, or in Illinois.

102) The closest anyone has come to getting an answer out of Greenwald about the questions about judgment raised by his work on Matt Hale’s behalf was in an interview in Rolling Stone in 2013.

rollingstone.com/culture/cultur…

103) His answer was typically self-serving and indicates a lack of any regret: “To me, it's a heroic attribute to be so committed to a principle that you apply it not when it's easy ... not when it supports your position ... but when it defends and protects people that you hate."

104) All very noble-sounding of course, but it hardly squares with the reality of how he conducted himself. Glenn has never voiced a hatred of Hale or WCTOC in any of his dealings with them; but his expressions of hatred for Center for Constitutional Rights and SPLC were vivid.

105) Over the ensuing years, he’s manifested this blind spot, and supremely bad judgment, many times. Remember how he tweeted out an ad by the Oath Keepers, soft-pedaling them as “a coalition of former police, military and public officials”?


thedailybanter.com/2013/09/the-si…

106) More recently, of course, he has appeared frequently on Fox News with Tucker Carlson. Carlson’s record of promoting white-nationalist causes and ideas clearly doesn’t bother Greenwald.

psmag.com/news/lol-stop-…

107) In the process, of course, he has become exactly what he once derided caustically: a “Fox News liberal,” one whose appearance on the network is mainly used to help forward right-wing talking points and destroy the left. He’s now a Useful Tool.

salon.com/2007/09/28/est…

108) And now he is defending his fellow faux progressives as they join Carlson in his campaign to minimize and defend fascist white nationalism as Not Really A Problem.

109) But apparently it is only a problem in Brazil. Because Glenn lives there and he is seeing the consequences in person. Perhaps Greenwald should try living in the States again, so he can experience firsthand that the consequences are here too.

washingtonpost.com/outlook/2018/1…

110) Indeed, he probably should have to face these consequences, since his record of minimizing, normalizing and empowering the white nationalist right in the USA contributed to the problems we are facing now. Thanks for nothing, Glenn.

vox.com/2019/4/4/18295…

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