Glenn Greenwald Profile picture
Mar 7 8 tweets 3 min read
This @NewStatesman article is entitled "We Have Lost Russell Brand." The "we" appears to be "the left" (I never knew NS was the avatar and membership-arbiter of "the left").

What's fascinating are the views now identified as hallmarks of the "far-right"

newstatesman.com/comment/2023/0…
In order to argue that Brand is no longer on the left but the right (despite what it acknowledges is his ongoing admiration for Bernie and Corbyn), look at the views that are now identified - in the first paragraph - as ones that mark you as being on the "far-right". Just look: Image
For as long as I can remember, those views - contempt for corporate media and Big Pharma, anger over mistreatment of "heroes" Assange and Snowden - were deeply associated with the Western left.

They're views I always held and still did. Now these are right-wing views? Evidently. Image
It is indeed true that all those views - hatred of corporate media, distrust of globalized ("multi-national) corporate giants, holding the US Security State in contempt and its adversaries as heroes - are now right-wing markers.

Much has indeed changed. But Brand and I haven't.
Similarly, distrust of the motives of the US/NATO proxy war in Ukraine is also a far-right signifier. Here we have yet another inversion: the liberal-left reverses western security agencies, globalized corporations and their wars as benevolent. Only the "far right" distrusts them Image
Thus does this article end on what should be a bizarre, nonsensical note but instead has now become standard: Brand is not a leftist but instead has fallen in with the likes of Joe Rogan, Tucker and myself and our hatred for Western wars, the US Security State, and corporatism. Image
(And by the way: for all your poser-left types now slyly trying to distance yourself from the Biden/Pelosi/EU proxy war in Ukraine and even imply you were opposed all along: that won't work. When it mattered, only a few took those bullets and you, as usual, were unwilling).
I should note: the article's last paragraph stumbles into a truth it - and mainstream discourse generally - desperately avoids. The more relevant dichotomy than left/right or Dem/GOP is pro/anti-establishment. Failure to understand this makes one's political analysis worthless: Image

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More from @ggreenwald

Mar 8
Please take a few minutes to read Seymour Hersh's reflections on @DanielEllsberg, who we just learned has terminal cancer. Beyond Ellsberg's great courage, it reflects a lot about many things, including how radically journalism has changed:

seymourhersh.substack.com/p/my-fifty-yea…
We went from our greatest journalists working subversively within large media outlets designed to serve the CIA and FBI trying instead to expose their worst secrets, to senior millennials at NBC and the WPost becoming journalistic icons by glorifying the traumas from mean tweets.
When Ellsberg revealed to the American people that the USG (under JFK, LBJ and Nixon) were deliberately lying to them about the war in Vietnam, the WH, CIA and FBI smeared him as a Kremlin agent who deserved life in prison. Liberals now perform this role:

Read 6 tweets
Mar 6
Everyone saw this happen. It was never justified to treat as proven COVID's zoonotic origin, nor any reason to mock the "lab leak" theory.

But media outlets did. That's because COVID's origin became politicized, and media outlets, as always, sided with their ideological tribe.
Add this near the top of the mountains of media scandals. On a vital question of this generation - how did COVID originate? - they claimed a certainty they lacked, and banished a theory that was fully viable, because they prioritized their partisan allegiances above reporting.
Probably the most incredible media fact -- one so shameful the NYT has to ignore it -- is that their lead COVID reporter maligned the lab leak theory as **racist**, only for key parts of the USG itself to now admit it's a likely explanation.

Fauci gave the orders; they obeyed.
Read 6 tweets
Mar 4
There's a reason why establishment pundits can't understand @rustyrockets's worldview, so resort to screaming "far-right!". There's also a reason he has his ]show on @rumblevideo, where - after just 6 months - his audience size exceeds many cable shows:

Establishment media can only understand the world through a binary prism: 1) affirm every liberal piety or 2) "far-right."

For some, the "far-right" label is a coercive tool for those who reject their orthodoxies, but most are just too dumb to see past those 2 crude categories.
Also, I know that once liberal media and the Dem Party unite in lockstep to affirm a narrative - the "lab leak" theory is debunked, Biden laptop is "Russian disinformation," the Kremlin controls Trump - all critical thinking stops. No dissent is even included in the discourse.
Read 4 tweets
Mar 3
When George Bush 41 invaded Panama in 1989, the NYT heralded it as "a rite of passage" for all US Presidents: meaning, to be a real President, you have to start a new war.

Trump was the first president in decades not to do that.

nytimes.com/1989/12/21/wor…
Trump escalated bombing campaigns he inherited from Obama in Syria and Iraq against ISIS and AQ - as he vowed to do during the 2016 campaign - but his refusal to involve the US in a new war was aberrational.

Other media said Bush's invasion of Panam would end his "Wimp" problem.
The first 5 gushing paragraphs of this NYT article on George Bush's brave willingness to invade *Panama* -- and how it shows he's a tough US President like all the rest -- are just insane.
Read 4 tweets
Mar 2
I hate to even have to mention him, but nothing about Sean Penn's fanatical support for Biden's war policies should surprise.

In 2013, at a small salon in LA for "Hollywood leftists," Penn was *screaming* at us for criticizing Obama's bombings, claiming he knew what we didn't.
There were a few actual critics of Obama from the left (Danny Glover and Amber Heard🤷‍♂️), but most were rich producers who called themselves "the left" but poured millions into Obama/DNC.

But Penn was the most fanatical, implying he had inside knowledge.

I don't think Penn was lying. Someone had "shown him around" both Pakistan and Afghanistan, and -- after spending years as the kind of leftist who openly supported Hugo Chavez -- he was suddenly defending CIA and covert dirty wars with a bizarre, observably unhinged passion.
Read 5 tweets
Mar 2
We just showed this NBC clip on our program. I can't get over it. Please watch it. These people analyzed the scientific and geopolitical implications of a fabricated tale the CIA gave them.

These are the ones who get invited to "disinformation panels" in Aspen and Davos:
Maybe this is a naive but it's what I always wonder.

They read this week's reports that the Havana Syndrome is fake and the "lab leak" theory viable.

They know they spent years telling their audience the opposite.

Why doesn't that bother them? How do they justify ignoring it?
I understand they have no career pressure to admit they spread disinformation. I know their media corporations reward it.

I mean on a personal level. Doesn't it bother them at all? They know they repeatedly spread lies that are now debunked, yet they just never acknowledge it.
Read 4 tweets

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