Glenn Greenwald

Over the last few years I've made a habit of trying to understand others as much as possible. Historically I only read left-leaning sources but after exposing myself to more, it became clear that I was blind to the other side's perspective. I've found that there was typically validity to multiple views on most topics, and that selection bias (what news sources choose to cover) was a big problem. So these days I visit a number of sources, which is easier today because there are sites that try to represent views from different parts of the spectrum. Staying informed does take time (at least an hour a day), money (supporting news via subscriptions), and effort (takes away mental energy from other things). Apart from the list below I also read and subscribe to a few different local news sources. Over the last several years, local news has been dying (financial issues) and I think that's a bad thing because it means you miss things happening around you that affect your life more so than national news, and because you only get a homogeneous national perspective (often reduced to a left versus right axis) instead of the more diverse issue-to-issue variation that is possible locally. I recommend identifying a few local sources near you if you have the time to read! UNCATEGORIZED 1. Hacker News (I check the first couple pages several times a day) 2. Matt Taibbi (https://taibbi.substack.com - investigative reporting by a former Rolling Stone journalist) 3. Glenn Greenwald…

Thats a mischaraterization at best, which is sort of my point. What GG said and his real positions don't matter. What matters is he bucked the narrative (mostly when he pushed against the propaganda push that the HB laptop leak was of Russian origin) and that made him bad, and then the justifications for his "bad" label were found afterwards. They don't hold up to scrutiny but the character assassination is done already. In his own words: “I don’t think that the emails — so far — reveal a huge scandal. They so far just establish standard sleaze and DC corruption. The huge scandal to me is the blatant rank-closing and cone of silence — a prohibition — erected by journalists around this story to defend Biden,” “Is there a single journalist willing to say with a straight face they believe the emails relating to the Bidens are either fabricated or otherwise fraudulently altered, but the Bidens just aren’t saying so?,” “When you report a huge archive, there’s no way to prove the negative that none of it is altered. You investigate & confirm as much as you can, then use your journalistic judgment. The only way you get confirmation is when the subjects of the reporting don’t deny the authenticity,” “You know the subjects of the reporting will immediately claim they’re fake if the are. Of course they will: that would kill the reporting!” “There’s a reason the Bidens aren’t claiming they’re fake,” https://greenwald.substack.com/

Amazing, there are still people out there believing the Russian Bounty hoax? https://greenwald.substack.com/p/liz-cheney-lied-about-her-role-in

I recommend reading Glenn Greenwalds piece on censorship: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-pressure-campaign-on-spotify I believe the core issue here is: while the first amendment applies to government, it is something that businesses should try to make a core part of their ethos. The censorship that tech companies have been doing are really against free speech and freedom of association. Yes, companies are within their legal right to do the censorship we are seeing. That doesn't mean it's right.

Start here, actual journalists and actual "liberals": https://taibbi.substack.com My quote was from here: https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-folly-of-pandemic-censorship Also: https://greenwald.substack.com

> The left-leaning and "centrist" news love to lie by omission (just look at the Rittenhouse trial.. or lie by lying: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29774315 I also would let left-media (which I consider to be the majority) off the hook as not "exaggerate[ing] and outright mak[ing] shit up": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_2019_Lincoln_Memorial_confrontat… Insurrection cop was hit on head (and killed) with fire extinguisher: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-false-and-exaggerated-claims There's also a lot of dodgy terminology too, like Trump "putting children in cages" which is a "right-style" (think of the children) provocation not dissimilar to anti-Semitic or witch-hunting misrepresentations.

Overcorrection? No it is not. They enjoy misleading and diverting attention away from the things that really matter. Just take a look at these lawsuits: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/a-court-ruled-rachel-maddows-viewers https://www.businessinsider.com/fox-news-karen-mcdougal-case-tucker-ca… Look, these talking heads are simply well-paid entertainers - nothing more. All they spew is lies, propaganda and downplay the things that are really happening. Unfortunately they have a willing audience in the majority of Americans who cannot see through all the bullshit. I personally cannot recall when last I tuned in to any of the mainstream media outlets. So I'd recommend that they be stripped of all of those protections and get the same punitive treatment that we, the People (we are the ones who pay taxes, BTW), get when we talk shit. Trust me, that'll make them sit up.

It is going on right now. "And the answer is obvious: they all serve as mouthpieces for the same propagandists and disinformation agents of the CIA, FBI and other security state agencies. In this capacity, they dutifully write down and vouch for what they are told by those agencies to publish without any investigative scrutiny or confirmation. The most amazing part of it all is that when they try to malign independent journalists for not doing "real reporting” — real reporting like these corporate outlets do — this is what they mean by real reporting: getting a call from the CIA or FBI and being told what to say. And that is why they so often mislead and deceive the public with blatant disinformation in unison." https://greenwald.substack.com/p/corporate-news-outlets-again-confirm

Not just that. DEI gives more preference to someone just because of their skin color. Lebron James or Oprah or Obama and their kids get more preference despite all of them being filthy rich. But if you are a white farmer's kid, then you are f'd. I would recommend reading the ruling by a recent judge. He brings up a lot of irrational side effects of identity politics based laws: Appellate Court Strikes Down Racial and Gender Preferences in COVID Relief Law: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/appellate-court-strikes-down-racial

I have certainly not hit "every platitude"! I left out the "protecting our children" platitude. Thought it might be a little bit over the top. ;-) In any case, I think Glenn Greenwald has the best take on internet censorship: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/democrats-and-media-do-not-want-to

Beneath a veneer of neutrality in the headline ("attack from right and left"), the article mostly attacks republicans. The only criticism of a left-wing organization is that the ACLU doesn't defend freedom of speech as much anymore. It doesn't mention the pressure on tech companies to censor more from the democratic party[1]. If you want to write a both-sides story about censorship, a great example would be the persecution of Julian Assange, the article doesn't mention that either. [1]: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/congress-in-a-five-hour-hearing-deman…

I made an account just to respond to this, for that guy. It will be easiest if I just post the original pieces which gathered such information, but you can follow the links within them yourself. NPR, Washington Post, NY Times, CNN, etc etc "independently confirmed" that Trump had protestors gassed to stage a photo op [1], that the officer in DC was beaten to death with a fire extinguisher [2], that Russia placed bounties on US soldiers [3], absolutely none of which happened, as we now have proof. Few retractions were made. You absolutely cannot trust a single word coming from the media apparatus, about anything, at any point. [1] https://greenwald.substack.com/p/yet-another-media-tale-trump-tear [2] https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-media-lied-repeatedly-about-offic… [3] https://greenwald.substack.com/p/journalists-learning-they-spread

Many stories get flagged on HN as well and I assume for different reasons. Here is one flagged from an hour ago: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/journalists-learning-they-spread I assumed it was worthy of discussion given the whole censorship debate and concepts of censorship like AI moderation or misinformation or disinformation.

If you take John Brennan at his word, yes, it is coming. Many powerful Democrat lawmakers are working toward allowing law enforcement (FBI, etc) to have the same tools against "domestic terror" as they do again foreign terror. Greenwald himself did a great write up about it: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-new-domestic-war-on-terror-is

> That's already a very large group of people to generalize. On the other hand, it's not that large a number of entities. And the people who work there are constrained by their employers in particular ways, and choose to remain. Here's the article Greenwald quit The Intercept over: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/article-on-joe-and-hunter-biden-censo… To the best of my knowledge nothing in it is untruthful. The Intercept demonstrably wouldn't publish it. Which of the other institutions listed do you expect would have? Is there an instance of any of them publishing anything substantively equivalent before the election? He quotes the NYT there in several places but the articles the quotes are from are minimizing the story and even then the authors became the targets of attack for even discussing it.

For context: this follow the departure of the other co-founder of the The Intercept, Glenn Greenwald. https://greenwald.substack.com/p/my-resignation-from-the-intercept

Greenwald rang the alarm on this just yesterday. Violence in the Capitol, Dangers in the Aftermath From the Cold War to the War on Terror: the harms from authoritarian "solutions" are often greater than the threats they are ostensibly designed to combat. https://greenwald.substack.com/p/violence-in-the-capitol-dangers-in-67… https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25686567

"All of these authoritarian powers will, ironically, be invoked and justified in the name of stopping authoritarianism — not from those who wield power but from the movement that was just removed from power. Those who spent four years shrieking to great profit about the dangers of lurking “fascism” will — without realizing the irony — now use this merger of state and corporate power to consolidate their own authority, control the contours of permissible debate, and silence those who challenge them even further" [1] https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-threat-of-authoritarianism-in

To extend your analogy, the players on the field only have so much they can do--Trump included. Might be worth asking who is in the owner's box, who is betting on the game, and why are we in the stands cheering so aggressively for either side in the first place. With Trump out in January, I hope more people are critical and skeptical of the various institutions in our country that wield the actual power. For a more in depth analysis, would highly recommend Glenn Greenwald's take: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/no-matter-the-liberal-metric-chosen

I'd suggest reading the e-mail thread regarding the article: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/emails-with-intercept-editors-showing The editor in no way seems compromised to me. There's a lot of very clear, straightforward and polite feedback. I suspect what we're seeing in the statement is a great deal of frustration, which is perhaps not surprising.

Greenwald called them pathological, censorious, illiberal and equates editorial oversight with censorship. It's hardly petulant and unprofessional to suggest, in response, that he's behaving like a grown-ass dude throwing a tantrum. He's also just published their recent correspondence. It doesn't make him look great either: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/emails-with-intercept-editors-showing

Greenwald's follow up posts: Article in question https://greenwald.substack.com/p/article-on-joe-and-hunter-biden-censo… Emails with editors https://greenwald.substack.com/p/emails-with-intercept-editors-showing

Yeah some real standup guys: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/02/17/lincoln-projec… > A study conducted after the 2020 election found that the group’s effect on the election’s outcome was trivial to non-existent — not surprising given its penchant for spending money on ads that aired in electorally irrelevant places such as Washington, D.C. or which circulated almost exclusively in liberal cable news and social media venues, and thus had no purpose other than to enable its consultants to take large commissions from the ad spending. They were producing ads solely for liberals, with the overriding intent not of defeating Trump but inflating their net worth. And it worked: until they were no longer needed. https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-lincoln-project-facing-multiple Sounds like their grift worked on you.

> you can't pay for investigative journalism with a substack model Why not? Some of the best investigative journalism I've read has been on Substack. > Most news organizations have figured out that partisan coverage helps grow your audience while criticizing your own team results in cancellations ... Journalism is hard work and it doesn't pay much That's probably true of e.g. the New York Times, but the Intercept isn't a great example. The history there is quite complicated. When they had Greenwald at the helm they were doing OK and got an audience. Once they booted him out and went fully partisan they lost most of their audience but the editors didn't care because they are/were funded by a billionaire. Even then it was complex. Greenwald technically wasn't cancelled - he quit because his editors didn't want him to write stories attacking their side - and wrote about how Omidyar had successfully divorced his funding from his own political views here: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/pierre-omidyars-financing-of-the?utm_… no matter how much my attacks escalated on his [Omidyar's] core beliefs and the other groups he was heavily funding — and escalate they did! — I never received any remote signal that my outspoken journalism and commentary were imperiling his ongoing funding of The Intercept. [The Intercept] is a dream job for most of [the employees]: enormous salaries, endless expense accounts, a complete lack of job requirements, and no need…

In the same way that the Beltway connections are somewhat hard to pin down. I don't have much ready to hand - and it may be hard to come up with hard proof. There is Greenwald[0] and the infamous Homeland Security Disinformation Best Practices and Safeguards Subcommittee - here are the bios[1]. Note how interlinked these people are. They don't need to document their interactions, because they basically think alike and know what to do without specific instructions. The FBI acts as the primary point of contact from the letter agencies, as per the title if the article we are discussing. The Beltway revolving door takes care of the rest of the interactions, including providing experts to the media, so the rest of the Beltway can just listen and act. [0] https://greenwald.substack.com/p/congress-escalates-pressure-on-tech [1] https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/2022-07/HSAC%20Disinformation%… [pdf]

"There are ton of garbage science around. That makes me even less confident about things that are not even science." Your argument, or world view, is that you can determine what's true by looking at who scientists trust and the peer reviews of these scientists. I've just named a man who is by universal academic consensus a scientist, but who - as you're aware - produces garbage science without any pushback. In fact, as far as epidemiology is concerned, ICL are the bees knees. One of their worst most obviously garbage papers has over 1300 citations! And so your answer is that scientists don't spend time rebutting it (and never have) because it's so obviously bad they don't need to? Why do they keep citing it then? Where are the initial takedowns that established so strongly this guy was a fraud that scientists don't feel a need to write any more, and why do no governments seem to be aware of this? Put another way, how can you determine which scientists are doing good work vs bad if all the available evidence, like citation counts, suggests they don't care and confuse bad work for good all the time? Remember that scientists are always "selling", which is why they complain about the grant application process so much. They are selling interesting claims to governments, not exactly known for being discerning buyers. "It took even more years of solid journalistic investigation to show how much of a fraud he was." Yes, it was hard work. Do you think current mainstream…

This is an interesting and somewhat irritating take by Greenwald. I'll just put a counterpoint to one point he made that I was careful to get a grasp of what was going on: Greenwald [Today]> Their control over multiple huge platforms that they purchased enables them to punish and even destroy competitors, as we saw when Apple, Google and Amazon united to remove Parler from the internet forty-eight hours after leading Democrats demanded that action, right as Parler became the most-downloaded app in the country Greenwald [Jan 12]> The day after a united Apple and Google acted against Parler, Amazon delivered the fatal blow. The company founded and run by the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, used virtually identical language as Apple to inform Parler that its web hosting service (AWS) was terminating Parler’s ability to have AWS host its site: “Because Parler cannot comply with our terms of service and poses a very real risk to public safety, we plan to suspend Parler’s account effective Sunday, January 10th, at 11:59PM PST.” Because Amazon is such a dominant force in web hosting, Parler has thus far not found a hosting service for its platform, which is why it has disappeared not only from app stores and phones but also from the internet. This is kind of along the right lines but gets the details wrong. Greenwald is intelligent, insightful, has good sources and is not afraid to annoy people, so it is tiresome that he has a bad habit of fudging details to make a shiny claim…

Many dissenters including investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald agree with my assessment [1] that this is not an attempt to weaken facebook, but to commandeer its power to censor. In addition to how I've shown her call to censor "hate speech" is likely a call to censor viewpoint opponents to critical social justice, whom she associate herself with corroborate this interpretation. For instance her laywer, Andrew P. Bakaj[2], is an attorney and former intelligence officer with the CIA. He was the principal attorney representing the whistleblower who filed the initial complaint that led to the launch of multiple investigations by the United States Congress into the Trump–Ukraine scandal, the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump, and, ultimately, the first Impeachment of Donald Trump. Neither of these facts are the hallmarks of a moderate person that seek measured actions for the best of viewpoint diversity and civilized dialogue. [1] https://greenwald.substack.com/p/democrats-and-media-do-not-want-to [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_P._Bakaj

>here's a very well-reasoned argument to be made by people who are experts in this area Honestly, this is an amazing essay thanks for sharing. From an anthropological perspective this is exactly what I'm talking about, people wanting to feel like they're at some apex of history. Her arguments amount to "this was a coup attempt because I've redefined what a coup attempt means to fit this specific instance". The entire piece is an exercise in redefining what have long been well understood to be the hallmarks of a Coup actually are. Exaggerated language is throughout the essay, but there's a couple sentences that stand out to me: >>During the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, Trump drew Joint Chiefs Chair General Mark Milley and Defense Secretary Mark Esper out of a White House meeting to follow him for a provocative photo-op in front of a historic church. Paramilitary forces under the president’s command cleared a passage for his group across Lafayette Square. Summarily debunked[1], but it's one of those enduring memes from this that strikes onlookers as so foul that that any attempt to correct the record is met with discordance and invective. "Paramilitary" forces? The Park Police are now a ... paramilitary force? Let me get my cousin in Montana on the phone, I'm sure he'd love to know this. >>As in the case of other coup attempts, the president’s actions have put us on the brink of civil war. Yes, a very "expert" opinion here. "On the brink of civil war", we are. We're…

Matt Levine on Bloomberg for everything finance: While I am only medium interested in finance, Matt Levine makes it all sound farcical. It is usually a fun read, and I learn something about how the world runs (or usually in which creative ways people abused the way the world runs) https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthew-s-levine Derek Lowe on medicine. He is an absolute expert on the topic, but doesn't mind to speak his opinion and to explain it on a sufficient level for me. https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/ Scott Aaronson on algorithms and quantum physics. Scott is a great communicator, and of course an absolute expert on these topics. He does sometimes go a bit off topic though. https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/ Sabine Hossenfelder on experimental physics. Expert on these topics, and has a (very) critical opinion, which is refreshing in this field and can give a feel about what is going on. Lately, she did shift to more pedagogical explanations which are a bit too low level for me, but the blogposts still contain gems from time to time. https://backreaction.blogspot.com/ Glenn Greenwald on journalism and politics. While he is very sharp and opinionated, he digs up new stories and has an out-of-the-box but well-informed opinion I largely agree with (I'm an anarchist). https://greenwald.substack.com/