Glenn Greenwald

>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…

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…

> 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_source=publication-search

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…

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…

"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…

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/