So, I went and researched them and found they were doing all these great transparency projects exposing corrupt factions, corporate and political. And I interviewed Julian Assange and I wrote about them and I said, you know, "The one thing they're really missing - they're sitting on all these big leaks, they are missing financial support." So, I encouraged all my readers to go support them and send money to them, and you can do it by PayPal or bank wire.
Hoooooooray, Glenn! cry his actalikes and wanna bees.
Of course, a year later, after Wikileaks had published government classified documents, PayPal shut down payment when the State Department declared its activities illegal -- without a court intervention. Greenwald had no say over this, of course, but it's telling that since leaving The Intercept (who he also accuses of stoking the Left's white supremacy charge by not including clarifying information), he's returned to being a blogger -- i.e., nobody censors his work and lives to tell about it -- and become a paid mouth for Fox, which has roiled some folks royally.
But more, his Libertarian pox-on-both-your-lesser-of-two-evil houses is both refreshing and irritating. It led to Greenwald characterizing as farce the events of January 6, and condemning the takedown of Twitter alternative, Parler, by politicians, as a form of censorship. And in what seemed a supportive rallying move for a fledgling new alternative to Youtube, Greenwald has taken up residence at Rumble, a site largely regarded (from the Left) as being a site for right wing nut jobs. He has a regular broadcast there, called System Update that says, Look at Me, the Vlogger.
Greenwald is getting six figures for being a star recruit to Rumble. (Maybe more now that Rumble has decided to go public on the NASDQ.) What's interesting here is that Rumble's major investor is PayPal CEO Peter Thiel. As the NY Post put it:
Prominent conservative venture capitalists including Peter Thiel and J.D. Vance are investing in free speech-oriented video streaming site Rumble Video, the company said Wednesday.
So, the very dude who cut off funding for Wikileaks is now, essentially, Greenwald's new Sugar Daddy. What makes this even more interesting is that PayPal is owned by Ebay tycoon Pierre Omidyar, Glenn's old Sugar Daddy. Incidentally, of course, Fox's Don Borgino, on whose program Greenwald had false accused the liberal media of spreading disinformation about Rittenhouse to international markets, is also a Rumbler.
When all of the complaints about Greenwald are added up it is troublesome. Greenwald has been dogged for years for his enthusiastic support of Bush's invasion of Iraq, and the aforementioned work with white supremacist Matthew Hale. But he's niggly too. He has often told viewers and/or readers that he co-founded The Intercept, but leaves out mentioning the other founders' names. Laura Poitras, one of them, expressed dismay at the time when Greenwald's delay in adopting encryption might have led to Ed Snowden being snatched in Hong Kong by agents of the regime. This situation is described in Snowden's Box: Trust in the Age of Surveillance, a book I reviewed last year. Poitras wrote,
When a mysterious person - using the handle "Cincinnatus" - pleaded with him to set up encrypted email, Greenwald blew off the request. "Despite my intentions, I never created the time to work on encryption," he later wrote. "It was simply that on my always too-long list of things to take care of, installing encryption technology at the behest of this unknown person never became pressing enough for me to stop other things and focus on it."
Cincinnatus, was Ed Snowden. And, of course, it calls into question who in the Surveillance State was accessing his hard drive (and seeing his sources) in the years before he finally adopted encryption. Again, as I've mentioned before, when Greenwald later produced a bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning book, No Place To Hide, he partnered with Amazon for a special deal that gave his readers an opportunity to procure the book for free if they applied for an Amazon credit card, details parsed by JP Morgan, who Greenwald had railed against in the past, noting their role in the 2008 Wall Street meltdown. It means applicants for the card would have exposed details they mightn't otherwise have done had they thought about it; instead they would have regarded it as safe because Greenwald made a deal with Amazon (another intel-partnering, data-leaking problem). The power of authority.
It's hard to know what to do with Greenwald any more. I believe lots of people probably feel that way -- even good old OpEdNews, which regularly runs Greenwald's articulate articles, but refuses, so far, to allow Rumble embeds in its pieces at OpEd, presumably because Rumble is regarded as rightwing nut job territory. (Rumble needn't be that, Greenwald might argue, because, as a new platform, meant to challenge YouTube, it's at the moment open to Left and Right, and if enough "free-speech" types from the Left populated its site, then it needn't be a conservative-only site. There's no need to give in to the partisan nonsense that pre-assigns political positioning. I have a couple of nits at Rumble -- me reading my lefty poetry, and an upload of video on hatred that Youtube took down as hate speech, even though that was the subject of the video! Still, wth Thiel involved in the Rumble project,as he was at the beginning of Facebook, its development bears watching.
These are trouble times for reporting and reading news, with so many of us at each other's throats. Left, Right, Center, Libertarian, Greenies, Fake News, Conspiracy Theorists. It's so bad that, as we've seen, getting to the origin of the pandemic has been almost impossible because politics trumped science, forcing them to start all over again (it's still in progress) to figure out what happened in Wuhan so it doesn't happen again -- standard procedure. The vaxxing issue is another topic that has caused journalistic mayhem. And now here comes Roe vs. Wade -- all over again, arguably, at the worst possible time. It's hard to know where to turn. I had been a Greenwald Substack follower (for a day), ponying up $5 to subscribe, but cancelled almost immediately when one of his Napoleonic guard dogs from Animal Farm came at me for mildly criticizing some blather Greenwald oozes once in a while, and the incident turned me off from the "free speech" champions posts.
An alien looking down warily from outer space would have to conclude from the current state of our inner space that we Earthlings are in freefall on our downward path to wisdom, as Kathrine Anne Porter, author of Ship of Fools, once wrote.
What happened? What the f*ck hit us? I watched a film last night called Bird Box. Some entity arrives in Russia and spreads in a pandemic. People everywhere who see the entity go mad or insane, and oddly enough, and, I thought, delightfully ironic, in the end the blind are leading the blind, but in a good way. The way it would probably be, after the smoke cleared, if the grids went down and we had to face each other again in a meaningful way and start all over again.
* This article first appeared in Counterpunch on December 8, 2021.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
