Baselessly accusing people of being Russian agents and weaponizing accusations of sexual misconduct are reputation-destroying cancers at the heart of liberal discourse.
An incredibly vicious and protracted war is being waged, seemingly with no end in sight, among numerous prominent liberal and left-wing commentators who work primarily on YouTube. The conflict erupted on May 26 when Cenk Uygur the founder and long-time host of The Young Turks, the largest liberal-left YouTube platform baselessly and falsely accused independent journalist Aaron Mate' of being "paid by the Russians," while his co-host, Ana Kasparian, spouted innuendo that Mate' was "working for" unnamed dictators.
Mate' is one of the very few left-wing journalists who reported skeptically on Russiagate and who questioned the U.S. Government's narrative about the civil war in Syria, including by traveling to war-torn parts of that country to do so. He won the 2019 Park Center for Independent Media's Izzy Award for his work debunking Russiagate. Yet with a one-minute rant from their insulated studio, Uygur baselessly branded Mate' as someone who is "paid by the Russians" while Kasparian asserted that he "seemed" to be working for Assad and other dictators -- a potentially reputation-destroying smear for a journalist and one that can be quite dangerous for a reporter who, like Mate', works on the ground in war zones.
The conflict engendered by those grotesque fabrications escalated significantly when Kasparian sent a private Twitter message to one of Mate''s defenders, Jimmy Dore, in which she threatened to accuse Dore of #MeToo-type sexual harassment from when they worked together seven years earlier. Kasparian made clear that her intent to publicly vilify Dore as a sexual harasser would serve as punishment for his criticisms of The Young Turks.
Dore then revealed Kasparian's threat on his program, and days later, Kasparian made good on her threat by accusing Dore of sexual harassment back in 2014.
It is long past time -- way past time -- that these tactics be rejected and scorned by everyone regardless of ideology or personality preferences.
I decided to analyze and dissect this conflict not in order to narrate everything that happened here or to arbitrate who is right and wrong with respect to every disagreement these parties are having. Instead, it is worth examining because the way this nasty exchange unfolded provides such a vivid and illuminating case study of two metastasizing cancers at the heart of liberal discourse.
Both of these weapons are ethically repugnant and corrupt obviously so yet somehow have become as common and accepted among Democratic Party followers as they are toxic and reprehensible.
From Hillary Clinton and Howard Dean to Rachel Maddow and countless other liberal cable hosts, casually and falsely smearing people as paid Russian agents is now completely normalized behavior in liberal culture.
And the list of people whose reputations have been destroyed from evidence-free and cynically deployed sexual harassment allegations or other vague accusations of sexual misconduct is too long to comprehensively chronicle. I examine these two issues in the format of video, which can be watched on the player below, because that is where so much of it has played out and because it seemed that is how the severity and magnitude of these abuses could be most effectively conveyed:
[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...)
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