Now Let Us Praise Glenn Greenwald

Irony does not do it justice. The idiotocracy of the American left is proclaiming, from the editorial pages of nearly all our major newspapers, that good old Joe Biden, the mastermind behind what appears to be an organized criminal enterprise, is going to bring decency back to America. At the same time American media outlets and American academics are enforcing systematic censorship of any piece of news, any fact that might make Joe look bad.

After all, Biden has made it safe to walk up  to unsuspecting women and girls, to grab them from behind by the shoulders and to stick your nose in their hair. Could there be a more public display of gross indecency and disrespect? Considering that America’s feminists have nothing to say about it-- or about Tara Reade-- you have to conclude that these sanctimonious hypocrites choose election success over their visceral opposition to rape.

We would make a great leap into intellectual integrity if we stopped calling leftist publications liberal, or even progressive. They belong to the radical left and aspire to a despotic takeover of the American mind.

While everyone keeps saying that Joe Biden is a decent human being, the media has engaged in a massive cover-up of his appalling behavior, of his son’s appalling behavior and of his family’s grotesque corruption.

Whether the gods of Silicon Valley or the editorial staffs of the mainstream media, a veil of silence has fallen over all stories about Biden’s corruption. The FBI has been investigating Hunter Biden for money laundering. The media does not report the story. The head of Biden enterprises goes public with a series of damning allegations against Joe himself. Not a peep from the media.

You can call it censorship or self-censorship, but if any reporter were to walk into an MSNBC editorial meeting and suggest reporting on the Biden scandals, he or she would immediately be dismissed, if not canceled. 

Amazingly, the same is true at a leftist publication called The Intercept. Co-founded by a gay British socialist named Glenn Greenwald, the site will not allow Greenwald to address the Biden corruption charges in its pages. A publication that prides itself on journalistic courage is working hard to censor any story that might damage the electoral prospects of one Joe Biden. In Biden’s name, American journalism has gone completely Soviet.

As you know, Greenwald possesses a quality so often missing from our pusillanimous journalists. That would be-- integrity. He is not alone. Among those who offered the best writing about the Russia hoax and the impeachment fiasco were liberal writers, like Stephen Cohen, Aaron Mate, Matt Taibbi, Alan Dershowitz and Jonathan Turley. 

It may only be a glimmer of hope, but some American liberals still value liberality.

Anyway, Greenwald explained himself from his new home on Substack:

Today I sent my intention to resign from The Intercept, the news outlet I co-founded in 2013 with Jeremy Scahill and Laura Poitras, as well as from its parent company First Look Media.

The final, precipitating cause is that The Intercept’s editors, in violation of my contractual right of editorial freedom, censored an article I wrote this week, refusing to publish it unless I remove all sections critical of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, the candidate vehemently supported by all New-York-based Intercept editors involved in this effort at suppression.

The censored article, based on recently revealed emails and witness testimony, raised critical questions about Biden’s conduct. Not content to simply prevent publication of this article at the media outlet I co-founded, these Intercept editors also demanded that I refrain from exercising a separate contractual right to publish this article with any other publication.

I had no objection to their disagreement with my views of what this Biden evidence shows: as a last-ditch attempt to avoid being censored, I encouraged them to air their disagreements with me by writing their own articles that critique my perspectives and letting readers decide who is right, the way any confident and healthy media outlet would. But modern media outlets do not air dissent; they quash it. So censorship of my article, rather than engagement with it, was the path these Biden-supporting editors chose.

It was not about debating opposing points of view. It was about silencing a journalist who wanted to raise them, to allow others to debate them.

So, the Biden candidacy, in the guise of bringing civility back to America has provoked a rash of censorship-- and not just from small outlets like The Intercept. After all, Twitter and Facebook, behemoths in the business, are leading the charge and are policing thought at a level we have frankly never seen.

Greenwald describes the current cultural climate:

But the pathologies, illiberalism, and repressive mentality that led to the bizarre spectacle of my being censored by my own media outlet are ones that are by no means unique to The Intercept. These are the viruses that have contaminated virtually every mainstream center-left political organization, academic institution, and newsroom. I began writing about politics fifteen years ago with the goal of combatting media propaganda and repression, and — regardless of the risks involved — simply cannot accept any situation, no matter how secure or lucrative, that forces me to submit my journalism and right of free expression to its suffocating constraints and dogmatic dictates.

The American left is effecting a hostile takeover of the American mind. It is shutting down inconvenient speech. And it is manning the ramparts to defend one of the most mentally defective and corrupt candidates in American political history. America is being sacrificed on a bonfire of inanities.

Greenwald continues:

The current iteration of The Intercept is completely unrecognizable when compared to that original vision. Rather than offering a venue for airing dissent, marginalized voices and unheard perspectives, it is rapidly becoming just another media outlet with mandated ideological and partisan loyalties, a rigid and narrow range of permitted viewpoints (ranging from establishment liberalism to soft leftism, but always anchored in ultimate support for the Democratic Party), a deep fear of offending hegemonic cultural liberalism and center-left Twitter luminaries, and an overarching need to secure the approval and admiration of the very mainstream media outlets we created The Intercept to oppose, critique and subvert.

Good for him, and godspeed.