post truth - Glenn Greenwald and Iowa’s latest WTF Moments, by Paul Street

 

 little noxious nugget buried deep in Greenwald’s essay:

“all of this stopped being about The Science™ long ago — ever since months of relentless messaging that it is our moral duty to Stay At Home unless we want to sociopathically kill Grandma was replaced overnight by dictates that we had a moral duty to leave our homes to attend densely packed street protests since the racism being protested was a more severe threat to the public health than the global COVID pandemic.”

Please note four subtle and pernicious things here: 

the revolting ageist dissing of concern for the special vulnerabilities of old people (“Grandma”); 

the pandemo-fascist-bootlicking dissing of consensus epidemiological and public health science (derided as “The Science™”); 

the sick, Tuckems-style white boy suggestion that it was hypocritically pandemicist for George Floyd protesters to take to the streets en masse in 2020 (that suggestion is bullshit since the protests were outdoors and heavily masked and did not in fact function as covid-spreaders); 

and the revolting implied disregard shown for the critical importance of systemic and murderous white racism as an social and political issue, consistent with 

    his curious alignment with the white-nationalist neofascist Donald Trump and the January 6th marauders in their purported struggle with “the deep state.”

(This is consistent also with how Greenwald broke into the public eye many years ago – as the lawyer for Illinois Nazi leader Matt Hale.)

 https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/09/17/glenn-greenwald-and-iowas-latest-wtf-moments/ 

As the prolific left political scientist and media critic Anthony DiMaggio recently wrote me:

Some of Greenwald’s right-wing giveaways:

Attacking the Democrats as fascist and Orwellian while denying that white supremacy and fascism is a real thing on the American right. This is just monstrous and deplorable, but, hey, he made his bones defending Nazis, so that’s what he does.

He’s on my (left) side? Really? I don’t ally with white supremacists, the GOP, Nazis, and carry water for a fascist-denying, climate-denying, arch-plutocratic GOP. His opposition to NSA spying was almost 10 years ago. He can’t sit on his laurels forever. His appeal to the left has to be about more than that. If that’s it, plus all the normalizing of rightwing neofascist politics he’s been doing, it’s a sad state of affairs. And now he’s channeling GOP talking points with all the [anti-] mask stuff and [ripping on] AOC. He talks shit about her and not wearing masks at a gala, but says nothing about pandemofascists like Greg Abbot, Ron DeSantis, and Trump. You can’t do that and be taken seriously on the left, or what passes for it.

Where is GG’s attack on the GOP for the anti-CRT Orwellian spying on teachers in the classroom stuff? He has literally ZERO, ZERO to say that is critical of the GOP. All he does is attack Dems. Because that’s what Fox wants. That makes him a Republican. “Glenn Greenwald is a Republican Because FOX News Signs for His Checks.” That’s your headline right there.

 

https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/09/24/glenn-greenwald-is-not-your-misunderstood-left-comrade/