Crank Watch: Glenn Greenwald

Glenn Greenwald is among those whose primary role as of late appears to be manufacturing consent for Russian aggression and building a permission structure that enables policy makers and agitators to dismantle/undermine institutions, attack modern liberal democracy and demoralize international cooperation with western powers. He does this through deliberate disingenuity and misreporting, which can easily reach hundreds of millions of people thanks to his own large audience and the audience of those that repost him, often times to abhorrent ends. Perhaps most unforgivable of all is his promotion of the new 'weapons of mass destruction' lie, not concerning Iraq, but a lie just as sinister that's used to excuse Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine. Below is just a few small examples of his harmful and dishonest punditry.

Lies and false narratives

'Ukraine Biolabs'

Greenwald's shocking attempt to push the discredited Ukrainian biolabs conspiracy is an example of genuinely detrimental spreading of fake news. In 2022 this included him appearing on Tucker Carlson's fox news show to claim “When the government comes out and emphatically denies that they have biological weapons, we know they’re not telling the truth.”¹ Suffice to say the hysterical claims about Ukrainian bioweapons are completely unfounded, and used merely propaganda to justify the ongoing invasion.¹,² By pushing this myth Greenwald became everything he claims his critics are: a neocon spreading a lie about weapons of mass destruction in order to justify an illegal invasion, only in this case on behalf of Russia rather than NATO.

Defending Russian aggression against Georgia - Greenwald's long and bizarre history of Russia apologia

Incredibly, Greenwald has been engaging in Russian foreign policy apologetics at least since 2008, when he wrote an article in Salon effectively in defense of Russia's illegal invasion an occupation of Georgia.³,⁴ As has become a familiar playbook now, Greenwald cruelly dismissed Georgia as a "neocon project", and spread false claims including that the US trained the Georgian army to fight Russian forces, while downplaying how Russia funded separatists and deliberately created Russian citizens in South Ossetia in order to foment a militarised pro Russian force (the protection of which later being used as a pretext for the illegal invasion, once again a familiar playbook). ⁴

14 years later, nothing has changed: downplaying the threat of Russia to Ukraine, just days before they invaded

On Feb 23rd, 2022, Greenwald tweeted “The problem is that the CIA told the US media to tell everyone that they knew exactly what Putin was saying and deciding, and that he had decided on a full invasion of Ukraine, so they have to call it an ‘invasion’ otherwise this whole media/government act will seem like a fraud.”⁵ On February 24th, 2022, the next day, Russia started their invasion of Ukraine.

Smears and journalistic malpractice

Boosting 'The Grey Zone' propagandists

Greenwald regularly engages and collaborates with The Grey Zone. The Grey Zone is a notorious fringe left propaganda mill founded by major cranks and conspiracy theorists, including:

Max Blumenthal, a journalist the New York Times has described as one of 'Putin's useful idiots'¹⁰. The fact that Blumenthal recently gave a briefing to the United Nations Security Council on behalf of Russia, in which he engaged in relentless war mongering propaganda and recycled Kremlin talking points in order to justify Russia's invasion⁷ should tell you everything you need to know about him. Among his many, many other instances of journalistic malpractice includes the ridiculous conspiracy that Russia's bombing of Mariupol was actually a false flag orchestrated by Ukrainian militants⁸ and even a shameful conspiracy theory denying war crimes on October 7th.⁹
Aaron Maté, a journalist at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue once identified as "the most prolific creators and spreader of disinformation" on the Syrian civil war "among the 28 actors we investigated". Like Blumenthal, Maté is well known for pushing conspiracies on behalf of authoritarian governments, notably Assad's Syria for example by propagating smears about the White Helmets.¹¹
(Formerly) Ben Norton, infamous shill of the Chinese Communist Party, along with virtually every other adversarial dictatorship on the planet¹², who in 2016 had an abrupt and unexplained switch from being an ardent opponent of Assad in Syria to one of his most enthusiastic supporters online, followed by a prompt attempt to delete the extensive record of his writings opposing Assad.¹³

Smearing the 'open source' investigators who identified Russian war crimes

Greenwald has a long history of ferociously and disproportionately attacking journalists or organizations that publish evidence or testimony of war crimes committed by various regimes and dictatorships. In a bizarro McCarthyite rant he smeared Eliot Higgins and his Bellingcat group, an independent investigative journalism org known for making use of as advanced geolocation techniques and open source data to expose details about war crimes (most famously the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17)¹⁶, of secretly being a front for western intelligence agencies. This was based on a hysterical and false narrative, the evidence consisting purely of a small amount of donation money received by the National Endowment for Democracy, among its many other funding sources (the details of which is published on their own website), that surprise surprise was advanced once again by The Grey Zone.¹⁵

Never mind that such a tenuous argument could also be used to dismiss organizations such as Thompson Reuters or Reporters Without Borders, agencies that have also received NED funding in the past that one would hardly describe as 'fake'; it's worth noting that Greenwald has had made no effort to actually challenge or offer any substantive rebuttal of the many important works of investigative journalism Bellingcat has engaged in that has exposed corruption and or crimes against humanity in places such as Syria, Russia or China beyond smearing it as 'CIA'. It's more telling that the organizations that are the target of Greenwald and his Grey Zone associates' most vitriolic ire happen to be ones focused on reporting on hostile authoritarian governments.

What's highly ironic about this whole affair however is the hypocrisy; Washington Post recently exposed the funding Grey Zone's editors receive directly from Russia or Iran through their state owned media¹⁷ - more broadly The Grey Zone's funding largely remains opaque and undisclosed, and yet Greenwald would of course never remark or comment on this obvious more direct conflict of interest among his associates. The expression 'every accusation a confession' is perhaps what is most applicable here.

Misc

Moral obtuseness over the Charlie Hebdo shooting

In the tragic shooting attack against Charlie Hebdo magazine in which 11 people were killed, Greenwald distastefully decided to take the opportunity to write a deranged screed focusing almost entirely on Jews and Israel that was full of obtuse equivocations (his signature tactic).¹⁴

Ivermectin promotion

In the grand scheme of things this may be considered low stakes, but it's worth considering that Greenwald even promoted Ivermectin during the pandemic.⁶ Whatever your position is on Ivermectin is, it's undeniable that it's one of the strongest signals of right wing crankery, and a good indication of his media consumption being dominated by American right wing/Fox News slop, hardly that of a daring truth telling dissident 'leftist'.