From Substack
What drives online mob campaigns, and what does this new Gallup survey of the U.S. LGBT population highlight that merits further examination and investigation?
I had the privilege of having my name trend on Twitter for a good part of Wednesday and into Thursday morning because journalists in the liberal sector of media along with left/liberal activists accused me of transphobia and bi-phobia (with half-hearted accusations of misogyny tossed in) so many times that Twitter's algorithm catapulted my name onto its sacred most-discussed list. Twitter's new team of extremely politicized editorialists summarized the trending term this way:
So repetitious were the accusatory tweets that a journalist entering my name in the Twitter search feature found these helpful prompts:
Among the many bizarre aspects of this episode is that I am and long have been someone who resides on the far end of the spectrum when it comes to trans rights: in favor of full legal rights for trans people, in favor of honoring their gender identity, and opposed to efforts to malign or exclude them, so much so that, in the past, when attacked on the rare occasions that I discuss this issue, it is almost always from people who oppose the core tenets of trans rights, not from those who support them. If I, with these views, am a bigoted enemy of the trans movement, then who are its allies? Do many of those who form this movement even want allies? So often it seems like they are more intent on insisting that those who perceive themselves as supporters are actually enemies due to the slightest deviations from the full panoply of dogma rather than persuading their actual enemies to become supporters: the persusaion-driven way that all successful social movements succeed in fostering change.
What prompted my discussion of these issues yesterday was a fascinating new Gallup survey of the LGBT population in the United States that shows enormous and highly consequential changes in a short period of time. When noting the new polling data, I highlighted several data points I found most interesting and, over the course of six tweets, laid out several questions that I said at the start "should lead to lots of deeper investigation to understand what explains some of these astronomical changes." And then the accusatory mob was off to the races.
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[Subscribe to Glenn Greenwald] Glenn Greenwald is a journalist,former constitutional lawyer, and author of four New York Times bestselling books on politics and law. His most recent book, "No Place to Hide," is about the U.S. surveillance state and his experiences reporting on the Snowden documents around the world. His forthcoming book, to be published in April, 2021, is about Brazilian history and current politics, with a focus on his experience in reporting a series of expose's in 2019 and 2020 which exposed high-level corruption by powerful officials in the government of President Jair Bolsonaro, which subsequently attempted to prosecute him for that reporting.
Foreign Policy magazine named Greenwald one of the top 100 Global Thinkers for 2013. He was the debut winner, along with "Democracy Now's" Amy Goodman, of the Park Center I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism in 2008, and also received the 2010 Online Journalism Award for his investigative work breaking the story of the abusive (more...)