"Corporate media has spent 8 years, in consensus, branding Trump a racist and White Nationalist."

"Meanwhile, actual Black voters are migrating away from Dems/Biden to Trump in what even CNN is describing as a historic shift (following Latino voters)."

Writes Glenn Greenwald, looking at this:

Corporate media has spent 8 years, in consensus, branding Trump a racist and White Nationalist.

Meanwhile, actual Black voters are migrating away from Dems/Biden to Trump in what even CNN is describing as a historic shift (following Latino voters):pic.twitter.com/QmBi29WRmp

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) June 17, 2024

I had to check the transcript to make sure Nikki Haley said this, which is so stupid I thought maybe some devious A.I. made the video.

This is one of the funniest and dumbest stats I've ever seen.

But again: this is the crisis now being seized on by the Nikki Haleys of the world to demand even greater control over what people can say and do online. https://t.co/yN5aBBAvFD

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) December 7, 2023

From the transcript, here's the full context (with boldface showing the part in the video):

2 from Glenn Greenwald.

This is what you will hear from all liberal corporate outlets for the next year: no, this time we mean it! This time Trump *really will be* fascist!

These are the people imprisoning non-violent Jan 6 protesters, prosecuting Trump to win an election, censoring the internet: pic.twitter.com/t4QxWFCYjq

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) December 4, 2023

Amazing yet so telling that the US politician who is one of the leading proponents of torture, secret CIA black sites, kidnapping, and sending everyone to an endless array of new wars except her own family ended up hated by her own voters but beloved by liberal corporate media. pic.twitter.com/C0IZ2Et6KE

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) December 5, 2023

Is there any good reason why this was withheld?

Think whatever you want about this video (which I regard as quite revealing).

That we only saw the Jan 6 excerpts that Liz Cheney and Adam Schiff wanted us to see, while they hid everything they didn't want us to see (like the below clip), corrupted everything from the start: https://t.co/78oT9JHpVQ

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) November 18, 2023

"The more time Vivek spends around the GOP establishment, the more contempt he harbors for them, and rightfully so."

The more time Vivek spends around the GOP establishment, the more contempt he harbors for them, and rightfully so.

The neocon GOP of 2002 never went away. They just pretended to under Trump. You see that now as they're partying as if it's Sept 12, 2001:https://t.co/zCSgizB63R

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) November 9, 2023

Ha ha... "two of them." One is Haley. The other is DeSantis in his elevator boots. I thought it was a cheap joke when I heard it last night and started yelling. It's only this morning that I noticed the "two of them" swipe at DeSantis. That's absurd and subtle enough to lift the joke to a new plane and get my respect. 

There's too much confusion...

It's not just that they've re-purposed the rainbow flag into the symbol for the US war machine: they've also managed to make the Ukraine Flag the central symbol of the Western liberal-left, so you have 21-year-old trans people making CIA arming of Azov their core identity.🌈🏳️‍⚧️💣 pic.twitter.com/SlYMf7mPgu

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) June 11, 2023

ALSO:

"In 2020, House Progressives and the incredibly radical Squad had exactly the same opportunity as House conservatives had."

"House conservatives defied Leadership to get major concessions to empower them and their agenda. House progressives did what they were told and got nothing.... The reason the Squad and House Progressives never defy Pelosi or anyone else is because they have a pathetic partisan media... who defend their harmlessness and venerate partisan subservience....  If these Dem Party loyalists who pretend to be leftists or whatever had even the slightest integrity, they'd apologize to @jimmy_dore , @briebriejoy , etc., because Gaetz & Co. just proved how politics works when you care more about your constituents than head-pats from the DNC."

Tweeted Glenn Greenwald, just now.

"The Department of Homeland Security is quietly broadening its efforts to curb speech it considers dangerous..."

"... an investigation by The Intercept has found. Years of internal DHS memos, emails, and documents — obtained via leaks and an ongoing lawsuit, as well as public documents — illustrate an expansive effort by the agency to influence tech platforms. The work, much of which remains unknown to the American public, came into clearer view earlier this year when DHS announced a new 'Disinformation Governance Board': a panel designed to police misinformation (false information spread unintentionally), disinformation (false information spread intentionally), and malinformation (factual information shared, typically out of context, with harmful intent) that allegedly threatens U.S. interests. While the board was widely ridiculed, immediately scaled back, and then shut down within a few months, other initiatives are underway as DHS pivots to monitoring social media now that its original mandate — the war on terror — has been wound down...."

From "TRUTH COPS/Leaked Documents Outline DHS’s Plans to Police Disinformation" by Ken Klippenstein and Lee Fang (The Intercept).

ADDED:

One day after a major story from @lhfang and @kenklippenstein proving the US Govt and Security State are directing Big Tech on what to censor, the #2 Senate Dem tries to radically restrict what "free speech" means in a way that contradicts all 1A caselaw:https://t.co/gzFnNaKAlQ

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) November 2, 2022

"Yet upon learning that the fascist, Kremlin-controlled, Nazi-like dictator had become ill, Maddow launched a one-woman crusade demanding that her fellow liberals pray earnestly for his recovery."

"She first posted an extremely effusive tweet: 'God bless the president and the first lady. If you pray, please pray for their speedy and complete recovery…' Presumably in response to widespread liberal confusion and criticisms — wait, you spent four years telling us he’s a fascist racist Nazi-like despot and now you insist that we pray for his health? — Maddow devoted a segment on her show in which, with great passion and emotion, she urged her viewers to react to Trump’s COVID diagnosis with the same compassion and through the same prism as if a friend who smokes cigarettes learned she had lung cancer.... There are a few potential explanations that may account for this extremely unusual and confounding behavior of praying for, rather than against, the well-being of a fascist dictator. Perhaps Democratic leaders are simply pretending to be hoping for Trump’s well-being for political purposes while secretly hoping that he suffers and dies. Or perhaps national Democratic politicians have ascended to a state of spiritual elevation rarely seen in modern political history, in which they are capable of praying for even those they most dislike, including ones they believe are imposing fascism on their nation? Or perhaps, maybe more likely, Democratic leaders do not really believe the things they have spent four years saying about Trump...."

Writes Glenn Greenwald in "Why Are Democrats Praying for the Speedy Recovery of a 'Fascist Dictator'?/People typically rejoice over, not lament, the death of someone they genuinely believe is a fascist dictator'" (The Intercept).

"As Joe Rogan’s Platform Grows, So Does the Media and Liberal Backlash. Why? The popular podcast host is a political liberal by all metrics. So what explains the contempt he provokes in liberal circles?"

Glenn Greenwald asks (at The Intercept).

The objections typically raised to Rogan concern his questioning of some of the very recent changes brought about by trans visibility and equality.... If the standard is that anyone who even entertains debates over the maxmialist [sic] and most controversial questions in this very new and evolving social movement is to be cast out as radioactive, liberalism and the Democratic Party will be a very small group.... The other critique centers on Rogan’s willingness to invite on his show various pundits with far-right views.... 

While Rogan is politically liberal, he is — argues former Obama 2008 campaign strategist and Rogan listener Shant Mesrobian — culturally conservative, by which he does not mean that Rogan holds conservative views on social issues (again, he is pro-choice and pro-LGBT rights). He means that Rogan exudes culturally conservative signals: he likes MMA fighting, makes crude jokes, hunts, and just generally fails to speak in the lingo of the professional managerial class and coastal elites. And it is those cultural standards, rather than political ones, that make Rogan anathema to elite liberal culture because, Mesrobian argued in a viral Twitter thread, liberals care far more about proper culture signalling than they do about the much harder and more consequential work of actual politics....

Democrats are crazy to let conservatism take possession of the crude, manly sector!

The political limits of understanding.

A core liberal/left principle for decades is we shouldn't just denounce people who do bad things -- criminals, terrorists, etc. -- but try to understand the underlying social causes, both to understand it intellectually & improve our ability to fix it.

Seems that's out, too: pic.twitter.com/DLO4CXW2RG

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) September 20, 2020

I read that and this lyric sprang into my head: "Harmony and understanding/Sympathy and trust abounding/No more falsehoods or derisions...." Here's how the mystic crystal revelation looks in action:

"But journalism is not supposed to be grounded in whether something is 'believable' or 'seems like it could be true.'"

"Its core purpose, the only thing that really makes it matter or have worth, is reporting what is true, or at least what evidence reveals. And that function is completely subverted when news outlets claim that they 'confirmed' a previous report when they did nothing more than just talked to the same people who anonymously whispered the same things to them as were whispered to the original outlet. Quite aside from this specific story about whether Trump loves The Troops, conflating the crucial journalistic concept of 'confirmation' with 'hearing the same idle gossip' or 'unproven assertions' is a huge disservice. It is an instrument of propaganda, not reporting. And its use has repeatedly deceived rather than informed the public. Anyone who doubts that should review how it is that MSNBC and CBS both claimed to have 'confirmed' a CNN report which turned out to be ludicrously and laughably false."

Writes Glenn Greenwald in "Journalism’s New Propaganda Tool: Using “Confirmed” to Mean its Opposite/Outlets claiming to have 'confirmed' Jeffrey Goldberg’s story about Trump’s troops comments are again abusing that vital term" (The Intercept). The  "ludicrously and laughably false" CNN report was that "during the 2016 campaign, Donald Trump, Jr. had received a September 4 email with a secret encryption key that gave him advanced access to WikiLeaks’ servers containing the DNC emails."

If Rumormonger tells a story to Newspaper1 and then Rumormonger tells the story to Newspaper2, Newspaper2 can't say that it is confirming the story! It can only confirm that Rumormonger is mongering that story. There's no more confirmation than if Newspaper1 and Newspaper2 were on a conference call with Rumormonger and heard the story simultaneously.

It's obvious to Glenn Greenwald that "the Letter was signed by frauds, eager to protect their own status."

1/ Regarding the apparent fact that the Letter’s organizer wanted to have me sign but the luminaries actually in control cancelled me (I was never asked), it’s been obvious from the start that the Letter was signed by frauds, eager to protect their own status, not the principles. https://t.co/HfeMi8Gtzd

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) July 18, 2020

He continues in a series of tweets:

2/ I’ve been defending these principles for decades, as a lawyer & journalist — **not** as a way of protecting honored elites from criticism, but by defending those with no power punished for their views: often by people like those who signed The Letter: [link to "GREATEST THREAT TO FREE SPEECH IN THE WEST: CRIMINALIZING ACTIVISM AGAINST ISRAELI OCCUPATION"]

3/ That large numbers of the Letter’s signatories don’t give the slightest shit about principles of free speech & discourse — many have been at the forefront of “cancelling” — but are only petulantly objecting because they now hear criticisms is obvious. Dozens of them are frauds

4/ All that said, that many of the Letter’s signatories are frauds does not impugn the principles they’re cynically invoking for their petty, self-absorbed interests. I devoted our show yesterday to this: it’s the marginalized that need these protections: [link to the video "Elites are Distorting the 'Cancel Culture' Crisis - System Update with Glenn Greenwald"]

Also, in that thread, Matt Yglesias responds:

I’ll just say I had nothing to do with deciding who was and wasn’t asked, had no idea who else was signing it, but think the obvious spirit of the enterprise was that they should welcome as many co-signers as possible.

Greenwald answers Yglesias:

I’m sure that’s true. TCW has been clear that he worked with a small handful of people — 4 in particular — to help spearhead the letter and I’m sure they’re the ones who played the key role (“outvoted” as he put it re: me). I’m almost sure I know who did it but won’t speculate.

Poya Pakzad asks:

I think Chatterton was being unclear about who did the voting. In that interview he said they were five ppl that did the reaching out to people. Were it those five people that out-voted you and didn't want to associate with you, or were it some of the signatories?

Greenwald answers:

Yeah, one was George Packer. He and I have had harsh criticism of each other’s work over the years. I’m sure it was stuff like that that drove it. But that’s kind of ironic, no? They were all proud of themselves, claiming they wanted to sign with those they disagree with.

"So dogmatic was the dictate that we all stay at home that any attempt to question or even balance it... was deemed immoral."

"Those who questioned state-mandated lockdown and stay-at-home orders, let alone left their homes to actually protest against them, were condemned as sociopaths who were willing to sacrifice the lives of old people for economic prosperity or the trivial, troglodyte desire to go to Applebees. Oftentimes those protesting lockdowns were vilified as white nationalists or at least driven by white racialist sentiments.... How is it remotely within the scope of the expertise of epidemiologists to pick and choose which political protests should be permitted and/or encouraged and which ones banned and/or denounced? Those are plainly political judgments, not scientific ones, and the shoddy, glaring conflation of them is nothing less than a manipulation, an abuse, of public health credentials. For scientists to purport to dictate which citizens can and cannot safely choose to leave their house — based not on health judgments but on their political ideology — is repressive, and certain to erode the credibility of their profession. Yet this is exactly what they are doing: explicitly and shamelessly.... At the very least, it is vital that we have the same health and legal standards apply to all citizens and all political ideologies when it comes to the right to leave one’s home, protest or engage in other legal activities. And at least as importantly, we need to understand whether public health experts were too restrictive in their advocated measures at the start of the pandemic, are being too lax now, or somehow can reconcile the radical shift in their posture on scientific rather than political grounds."

From "The Abrupt, Radical Reversal in How Public Health Experts Now Speak About the Coronavirus and Mass Gatherings" by Glenn Greenwald (The Intercept).

Greenwald: "The abuse of power... by the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA... is a vastly more serious scandal than 'Russiagate' ever could dream of being."

The abuse of power during the 2016 election by the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA -- and the subsequent Schiff-led lies repeatedly disseminated in the media to justify that abuse -- is a vastly more serious scandal than "Russiagate" ever could dream of being: https://t.co/hOF0K1F44E

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) May 9, 2020

Cruelly neutralized.

“At worst equally senile”: the 2020 election is going to be so inspiring. Already getting goosebumps. https://t.co/HRswM6TESH

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) March 11, 2020

Sunday morning sarcasm.

Very surprised, and very disappointed, and more than a little angry, that working-class Nevada voters didn't listen to the urgent and wise advice of Bush/Cheney neocons and DC Third Way corporatist operatives about who they should vote for. https://t.co/fq4jP1RC9t

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) February 23, 2020

"If you don’t consider FBI lying, concealment of evidence, and manipulation of documents in order to spy on a U.S. citizen in the middle of a presidential campaign to be a major scandal, what is?"

"But none of this is aberrational: the FBI still has its headquarters in a building named after J. Edgar Hoover – who constantly blackmailed elected officials with dossiers and tried to blackmail Martin Luther King into killing himself – because that’s what these security state agencies are. They are out-of-control, virtually unlimited police state factions that lie, abuse their spying and law enforcement powers, and subvert democracy and civic and political freedoms as a matter of course. In this case, no rational person should allow standard partisan bickering to distort or hide this severe FBI corruption. The IG Report leaves no doubt about it. It’s brimming with proof of FBI subterfuge and deceit, all in service of persuading a FISA court of something that was not true: that U.S. citizen and former Trump campaign official Carter Page was an agent of the Russian government and therefore needed to have his communications surveilled...."

Writes Glenn Greenwald at "The Inspector General’s Report on 2016 FBI Spying Reveals a Scandal of Historic Magnitude: Not Only for the FBI but Also the U.S. Media" (Intercept). Much more at the link.

"[I]t was Mueller, not Barr, who concluded there was no underlying crime, so if the next stage of this madness is haggling over an obstruction charge..."

"... that would likely entail calling for a prosecution of Trump for obstructing an investigation into what even Mueller deemed non-crime. After all the insistence that we put our trust in St. Mueller because he 'knows all,' the new story suddenly is that Mueller all along didn’t know and didn’t try to know.... Therefore, despite the fact that Mueller didn’t determine he had evidence for a charge, we can 'infer his conclusions by reviewing how he marshaled the evidence for and against guilt.' This meant we should read between the lines of what Mueller ended up 'saying,' so we can divine (I use that religious word on purpose) his true meaning. By not delivering the desired goods, Mueller is now being described as 'The God that failed Democrats,' by Edward Luce of the Financial Times, who makes the shockingly belated observation that the Democrats putting all their hopes in the 'magic bullet' of the Mueller investigation 'postponed the harder, less glamorous work the party needs to be doing.'... Members of the media... spent two years speaking of Mueller in mythical tones, hyping him as the savior who was pushing those 'walls' that were forever said to be 'closing in' on Trump.... This manipulative brand of news programming preyed upon the emotional devastation of liberal audiences, particularly the older people who watch cable. It told them the horror they felt over Trump’s election would be alleviated in short order. The median age of the CNN viewer is 60 and MSNBC’s is 65, and these people were urged for years to place their trust in Santa BOB, who knew all and whose investigation would surely lead to impeachment and 'the end.' All you had to do was keep turning in, because the good news could come any minute now!"

Writes Matt Taibbi in "As the Mueller Probe Ends, New Russiagate Myths Begin/Donald Trump couldn’t have asked for a juicier 2020 campaign issue" (Rolling Stone).

For similar outrage against CNN and MSNBC for making money flogging the Russia hoax, watch Glenn Greenwald on Tucker Carlson (from last night):

I'm avoiding reading the many pundits who seem to be straining to resist the reality of the Mueller report.

I read. I don't watch the news on TV. But if I wanted to laugh at these people in their ludicrous scrambling for dignity and a way to keep hating on Trump, I'd watch it on TV. I'd do what you can see Scott Adams doing in this video, watch them on TV and laugh at them. Look at their faces! They're so unhappy! But — maybe a bit like Trump himself, with his cheerful simple tweets this morning — I don't want to get bogged down in their dismal, entropic experience. It's too time-consuming. I watched a little. Laughed a little. But my thing is blogging, and I mostly use text.

But I scan the headlines and I pretty much know what's in the text. I don't drop into reading unless my senses tell me there's some rich material. And I feel that I already know the Trump haters' talking points about the Mueller report and Barr's letter about it. I'm not putting my time into counting the repetition of talking points I already know. If I applied myself, I could go deep — oh, so deep! — into all the perseveration about the word "exonerate." Do you know that the word means to relieve of a burden (an onus)? I am lightening my load by not reading all that stuff.

But I will read "Conclusion of Mueller probe raises anew criticisms of coverage" by Paul Farhi (WaPo):

“Nobody wants to hear this, but news that Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller is headed home without issuing new charges is a death-blow for the reputation of the American news media,” Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi wrote in a column published Saturday, a day before Barr nailed the collusion coffin shut. He added: “Nothing Trump is accused of from now on by the press will be believed by huge chunks of the population.”...

Journalist and commentator Glenn Greenwald — a longtime skeptic of the collusion angle — tweeted his contempt for the media coverage on Sunday, too: “Check every MSNBC personality, CNN law ‘expert,’ liberal-centrist outlets and #Resistance scam artist and see if you see even an iota of self-reflection, humility or admission of massive error.... While standard liberal outlets obediently said whatever they were told by the CIA & FBI, many reporters at right-wing media outlets which are routinely mocked by super-smart liberals as primitive & propagandistic did relentlessly great digging & reporting.”...

“Russiagate” has been a news media obsession since Trump’s victory in November 2016.... The cable news networks, particularly CNN and MSNBC, have added hundreds of hours of discussion about the topic, too. The story undoubtedly was an important factor in shaping voters’ perceptions before the 2018 midterm election, in which Democrats won control of the House. But the conclusion of the inquiry has put a question once hazily debated into sharp focus: Did the mainstream news media mislead?..

I call fake news on the assertion that the question is just coming into focus! The question has been there all along, but the Trump-resistance media has deliberately blurred it and actively diverted us from it. I don't even want to spend my time watching this phony hand-wringing over what went wrong. Either you did it on purpose or you're so insane and incompetent that you're not worth reading at all.