Do You Glug the Glenn Gleenglog Kool-Aid? Greenwald's latest Substack raises some excellent questions about contemporary journalism -- and some hypocrisy revealed. Cowards versus activists. Which are you?

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Greenwald's Kool-Aid
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Do You Glug the Glenn Gleenglog Kool-Aid?

by John Kendall Hawkins

Your answer to that question may be the most important one you address in your post-mod news-reading lifetime. It's at the core of what news is fit to print any more. And what constitutes news. And a few days ago, blogger Glenn Greenwald published a piece on his new Substack platform, "New Proof Emerges of the Biden Family Emails: a Definitive Account of the CIA/Media/BigTech Fraud," which gets to the heart of the matter, and which has been a focal point of his journalism for a number of years now. How the Biden Emails were handled by the Intercept were a last straw for the "intrepid" political analyst, and he explains why in great detail (natch) in his Substack and an excellent video embed.

But before delving into the moral-journo morass at the Intercept that Glenn Greenwald (maybe the most eco-friendly name of all time, but maybe he should add a middle name: Green) left behind, a better place to start a consideration of what's at stake in journalism in general is the New York Times Op-Ed piece he shared with Bill Keller back in 2013, just after Ed Snowden's revelations began seeping out through the Guardian, where Greenwald was blogging at the time. The piece is titled, "Is Glenn Greenwald the Future of News?" And it starts out as a sober, rational dialectical discourse between two adults who share a desire for disseminating vetted public interest information, while profoundly disagreeing on approach, but it soon veers toward prissy testicular-tude by the end, after StellarWind, Assange, Snowden and 'cream puff' David Brooks are brought into the picture. Nevertheless, it's an excellent place for a reader interested in the evolution of contemporary journalism.

In the OpEd piece, Keller starts by acknowledging their differences. Keller wants to make sure that Greenwald knows that it is neither the NYT's job, nor its desire, to be activist in its approach. He writes,

I've spent a life working at newspapers that put a premium on aggressive but impartial reporting, that expect reporters and editors to keep their opinions to themselves unless they relocate (as I have done) to the pages clearly identified as the home of opinion. You come from a more activist tradition - first as a lawyer, then as a blogger and columnist, and soon as part of a new, independent journalistic venture financed by the eBay founder Pierre Omidyar.

This is pretty standard stuff. Write pieces for op-ed, if you need to express strong opinions beyond the formulaic news structure of a typical story. Also, newspapers also often give writers a column on weekends where they can opine more expansively.

(Of note: Omidyar kicked the tires of the used classic Washington Post before settling for a shiny new vehicle that expanded on his Hawaiian community outspokenness, The Intercept, with Glenn -- and Laura Poitras.)

Greenwald, on the hand, counters with distaste for this standard approach. What Keller sees as a strength, Greenwald will not truck:

I don't think anyone contends that what has become (rather recently) the standard model for a reporter - concealing one's subjective perspectives or what appears to be "opinions" - precludes good journalism. But this model has also produced lots of atrocious journalism and some toxic habits that are weakening the profession. A journalist who is petrified of appearing to express any opinions will often steer clear of declarative sentences about what is true, opting instead for a cowardly and unhelpful "here's-what-both-sides-say-and-I-won't-resolve-the conflicts" formulation.

So, for Greenwald, what most beat journalists would call 'balance' is part of the shirkish environment that extends from the source calling the shots on access to information. Greenwald clearly despises this "self-neutering form of journalism" (ouch) and pushes further, as is his telling-truth-to-power-wont, "A failure to call torture 'torture' because government officials demand that a more pleasant euphemism be used, or lazily equating a demonstrably true assertion with a demonstrably false one, drains journalism of its passion, vibrancy, vitality and soul."

Greenwald is a master at alienating, isn't he? Damn. But you feel he has a valid point here, and if he hurts Keller's feelings to call torture torture, so be it. Recently, I read an Atlantic piece that reveals that the so-called Enhanced Interrogation Techniques are actually borrowed directly from the Gestapo -- "Versch????rfte Vernehmung." That's right, check out the memo the Atlantic provides. Imagine using the "soft" language of the Nazis to describe their torture sessions. No, I think Greenwald has Keller by the short and curlies on this one. And Keller knows it. The gentility of their conversation begins to devolve. Keller writes that the risks that the Assanges and Snowdens take to Reveal is very costly, and adds,

...the overwhelming preponderance of investigative reporting still comes for reporters who cultivate trusted sources over months or years, not from insiders who suddenly decide to entrust someone they've never met with a thumb drive full of secrets. Do you really think Snowden and Manning represent the future of investigative journalism?

Yeah, I think Greenwald does believe that.

Greenwald sums up his understanding of the differences between the two approaches: "Official assertions are our starting point to investigate ('Official A said X, Y and Z today: now let's see if that's true'), not the gospel around which we build our narratives ('X, Y and Z, official A says')." [ This really is 'elegant' calculus, and I am pleased. But the reader should peruse the full op-ed discussion (link above) because it's a rich vein of information about motivations and practical necessities that go into presenting textual news to the public. No more spoiler alerts for their duelling dramatic monologues.

But I do want to go back to one thing Keller said -- a well-wishing to Greenwald that was extremely ironic and moves us toward what Greenwald was practically raving about the other day at his Substack site with embedded video. Keller makes reference to uncovering the overreach of the NSA. He tells Greenwald, "I hope the coverage you led of the National SecurityAgency's hyperactive surveillance will lead to some overdue accountability." I dang near fell out of my easy chair; I let my jaw drop to my laptop instead. This gets to the crux of the matter immediately. Even if accidentally. And unanticipatedly.

2004

Just before the presidential election, in October 2004, Pulitzer Prize-winning NYT writer James Risen, along with colleague Eric Lichtbau, submitted a blockbuster piece on the Bush administration's approval of the NSA's blanket and illegal surveillance of hundreds of American citizens, no suspicion required, no FISA court stamp as required by law. The Times quashed the story. At the time Keller, answering criticism of the move, stated that the Times did not want to influence the election. But even after the voting, when Bush won re-election, the Times did not immediately publish the piece, but waited until the Christmas season of 2005, running it in late-December, and then only because Risen told the Times he intended to use the piece in his upcoming book. (Here is the piece that got quashed.) The 2005 piece caused a sensation upon publication, which Keller alludes to in his Op-Ed.

More importantly, it was the suppression of this story that inspired NSA contractor Edward Snowden, with the keys to the digital kingdom through his Microsoft Sharepoint administrator's role, to drop everything and become a whistleblower, so alarmed to discover that the Fourth Estate was seemingly aiding and abetting the growing surveillance state he was keened into. He writes in his memoir, Permanent Record,

Though I felt some relief once I'd resolved to disclose directly to journalists, I still had some lingering reservations. Most of them involved my country's most prestigious publications-particularly America's newspaper of record, the New York Times. Whenever I thought about contacting the Times, I found myself hesitating. While the paper had shown some willingness to displease the US government with its WikiLeaks reporting, I couldn't stop reminding myself of its earlier conduct involving an important article on the government's warrantless wiretapping program by Eric Lichtblau and James Risen. [p.188]

The most important government whistleblower ever did not trust the NYT to publish the criminal and unconstitutional activities of his government.

Greenwald has suggested as much himself about the 2004 suppression of the StellarWind story, but as Edward Snowden adds to his decision-making above, "Had that article run when it was originally written, it might well have changed the course of the 2004 election." [p. 188] Ironic, given that this was the very reason Keller gave for not running the piece. It further accentuates the divide between the two modes of journalisms rumbling in the OpEd piece -- the 'cowardly' and the 'activist'. It should also be noted that not reporting on the NSA here, and holding their lawlessness to account, meant that nine more years of surveillance infrastructural growth went by before the Snowden revelations began to appear and cause a ruckus.

Snowden explains that he might have chosen The Third Way -- a dump with Wikileaks, but was put off by what he saw as Assange's change of practice regarding leaks after the fallout from his posting of "Collateral Murder." Snowden writes,

This switch to a policy of total transparency meant that publishing with WikiLeaks would not meet my needs. Effectively, it would have been the same for me as self-publishing, a route I'd already rejected as insufficient. 1 knew that the story the NSA documents told about a global system of mass surveillance deployed in the deepest secrecy was a difficult one to understand-a story so tangled and technical that I was increasingly convinced it could not be presented all at once in a "document dump," but only by the patient and careful work of journalists, undertaken, in the best scenario 1 could conceive of, with the support of multiple independent press institutions.[p. 187]

So, instead, Snowden sought out the 'activist' journalist Greenwald and filmmaker Laura Poitras. The Oscare-winning doco CitizenFour was made; Greenwald started posting revelations and didacticsms at the Guardian.

It was James Risen himself who excoriated the editorial process that went into suppressing his and Lichtbau's NSA story. After leaving the Times and moving to the Intercept Risen wrote a long piece about his work at the Times, "The Biggest Secret: My Life As A New York Times Reporter In The Shadow Of The War On Terror." Risen reiterates that by not wanting to affect the upcoming 2004 presidential election, Keller was, in fact, doing just that, by withholding information of vital public interest. Risen adds details that only he was privy to and implies that, after the story got turned over to NYT's Washington bureau chief Philip Taubman for final approval, that the story was nixed not for editorial reasons, but as a favor between friends, Taubman and Michael Hayden. "Keller now says that Taubman's relationship with Hayden," writes Risen, "played an important role in the decision not to run the story." [p. 36] This is key.

2016

In the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by a margin of three million, but lost the electoral contest in swing states -- Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania -- in a massive voter disenfranchisement campaign that former Rolling Stone investigative reporter Greg Palast does an outstanding job of detailing in this video doco, The Best Democracy That Money Can Buy. (And his book How Trump Stole 2020 Election is still excellent in its exposition of the process of such theft.) But the public's eyes are moved to the Russians, and hacking at the DNC, by an Intelligence Community (IC) "assessment" that the MSM gobbles up and guzzles down and regurgitates. Today, it is still an open question regarding the degree of hacking at the DNC, if any, by any one agency. On the PBS Newshour in August, Julian came on and told Judy Woodruff that the DNC material he had published at Wikileaks, at that point -- "20,000 emails"-- came directly from insiders at the DNC -- and, though he named names, this "revelation" has gone largely ignored. Check it out:

This is an important exchange that tells an awful lot about how the MSM (PBS here) treats adversarial and independent journalists -- like bolshy junior siblings. Note that Judy (a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank) begins with the assumption that the emails referenced were the results of a Russian "hack." Assange needs to begin by immediately correcting her, explaining the difference between leaks (insider) and hacks (outsider), and telling her that they were leaked emails -- indeed, says:

Well, I can reveal to you the source of the information today. The source of the information is the Democratic Party. It is Debbie Wasserman Schultz. It is the chief financial officer. It is the communications officer, Luis Miranda, in fact all these people who have just been fired, and another (INAUDIBLE) so that's the source of the information that's known.

But there's more.

Woodruff is clearly suspicious of Assange's motives and reminds, matronizingly, that he's all about "transparency," and then presses him, even thoiugh he's just answered her, on why he would publish such reputation-damaging emails so close to the election (already the insinuation has been raised that he's working with the Russians) if he was not out to get Hillary. He answers, deftly,

Well, let's flip it the other way around. Let's say that I personally, the editor - my personal opinion is different to my function as an editor...But let's say that, personally, I loved Hillary Clinton. Would WikiLeaks still publish this material? Of course it would. Otherwise, we would be censoring it. That's our mandate. It's actually interesting to think about what media organizations wouldn't publish such material if it was given to them. [full transcript and video at: More DNC Info]

Again, this gets to the heart of the matter regarding how editorial decisions are made. The MSM won't touch emails about how Bernie Sanders's candidacy was viciously suppressed by the DNC; how she was secretly provided debate questions giving her a decided advantage; that she was enjoying large fees for appearances at Wall Street firms for reassurance talks. This is not newsworthy to the MSM. Or, at least, not as newsworthy as falsely developing a "collusion" connection between the Russians and the Trump campaign.

Though, for some reason, Greenwald doesn't bring up this Assange episode with Woodruff (maybe he doesn't watch PBS), the Russiagate storm that followed became central to critique of the media, and its coverage, thereafter. As far as Greenwald is concerned, the MSM totally went to work on the teats of the IC dugs, refusing to do their journalistic duty of vetting the IC assessment that was put out there which claimed the Russkies done did us dastardly, doo-dah doo-dah. Wikileaks went on to publish the Podesta emails. Then, as if anticipating Obama's lameduck transition remarks about how "we can do stuff too," the State department arranged for Assange's internet connection at the Ecuadorian embassy in London to be cut in October. No more surprises from Big J.

Such was his position when things heated up at the Intercept between himself and star reporter James Risen, who clearly bought into the false hysteria that Russians had interfered significantly in 2016. The two met in a podcast session on February 21, 2018, "Intercepted Podcast: Russiamania- Glenn Greenwald vs.. James Risen." Risen had by then established himself as a rabid Trump-hater (he was insinuating that Trump was a "traitor" and in a later astonishing piece would call him a "murderer*," and owned early on in the podcast that he was not up to snuff on the DNC doings and was playing catch-up. Nevertheless, though still admittedly ignorant, he pushed vigorously at the notion that Trump had colluded with the Russians. This was something that made Greenwald livid. By then, Greenwald had a Pulitzer Prize (Nowhere To Hide, titled after the Frank Church warning in '70s about the rising, perhaps unstoppable Orwellian surveillance state) of his own to match up with Risen's. The reader should check this out carefully -- or read the transcript, if you're in that much of a hurry. It's an incredible exchange in some ways that moderator, and Intercept writer, Jeremy Scahill feebly contains.

Suddenly, Risen, who had seemed staid and steady to me, comes off like a nutjob and/or a typical MSM talking head informed by IC sources he wants to protect. Greenwald is clearly galled -- especially after Risen gets seemingly personal about Greenwald's message and motive. Risen, channeling the animus so many readers have for Greenwald's persona, tells Greenwald, attacking his political coherence,

...You and I are in the communications business, and if the preponderance of what you write is interpreted by a large number of your readers in a certain way then, and it's not what you intended, then you failed as a communicator. Have you accurately communicated what you really believe over the last year?

This is an ongoing criticism of Greenwald -- that his likely important message is often negative and that it's hard to know sometimes what he believes when he's not being adversarial.

Greenwald laughs at Risen's "preposterous" assertion, and says,

So when you ask me, do I believe now that Russia played a role in the election or has my view changed? My view has never changed. My view is exactly the same, which is: I'm not going to accept claims until there's evidence for them...I don't think that there is very convincing evidence on the core claim that Putin ordered those hackings [of the DNC]. Even though I think there's evidence that some Russians did some social media activity.

But Risen doesn't buy this. However, one is already remembering his opening statement that he was "still educating himself" on the issue, but it's clear he's not starting out with an open mind but one filled with the opinions of his career cronies.

Again, relevant to the later riff with the Intercept over the Russiagate matter, Greenwald trots in journalist Masha Gessen, a Russian-born emigre, to vet the IC assessment. It's pointed and direct. Gessen says,

A close reading of the report shows that it barely supports such a conclusion. Indeed, it barely supports any conclusion. There is not much to read. The declassified version is 25 pages of which two are blank, four are decorative, one contains an explanation of terms, one a table of contents, and seven are a previously published report by the CIA's open source division on RT. There's even less to process. The report adds hardly anything to what we already knew. [p. 19]

Greenwald reminds us that this comes from a devoted hater of the man they call Vlad, the Gay Impaler. She looked long and hard, but she doesn't share in the value that others in the MSM have seen in the IC assessment. Risen can't do much with this handball bounce but double-dribble it.

2020

This returns us to Greenwald's most recent Substack piece, "New Proof Emerges of the Biden Family Emails: a Definitive Account of the CIA/Media/BigTech Fraud." Like the email scandal that preceded the 2016 presidential election, Greenwald was set to spring his own October surprise at the Intercept, ready to tell readers, in essence, that, if the NY Post's expose about the Biden emails found on a laptop at a Delaware repair shop and turned over to Rudy Giulinai were real (and they were), then the avuncular Joe Biden was lying his ass off (like with the Corn Pop incident: You believe me, don't you?) when he said he'd never gained from any financial dealings his son Hunter or brother James had made with foreign nations -- to wit, China and Ukraine. And, indeed, such dealings might now influence his decisions regarding policies with those countries. But the Intercept wasn't having any of it.

In fairness to the Intercept, the leading advocate for making the NY Post story into a haymaker for the Trump campaign was Rudy Giuliani and his hyperbolization of the Post's findings about the Biden Emails and their implications. Far from sober and rational, Giuliani, whose prosecutorial authority relies almost exclusively on his ancient RICO era credibility, "America's Mayor" has seemed to unravel under Trump, especially as a spokesperson for the administration. Not just his "China did it!" statements, but also in the nasty way he presents the Biden family corruption case, here, in October 2020, just before the election. If I heard right, he is seeming to imply that "toothless" Hunter, hanging around with jailbird types, would do anything for drugs, anything:

An Intercept editor watching this piece might cringe at the idea of unintentionally placing its first rate journalism credentials in a supporting role for such nastiness. If there's real news under the rancor of Rudy's diatribe it's at least partially drowned out by the emoting white noise of his delivery.

On the other hand, in his recent co-written memoir, Beautiful Things (reviewed here), Hunter admits he doesn't remember his Burisma days very much onnacounta he was partying it up with the $50,000 per month he got from the company and was always either shitfaced or recovering with a wig of the dog that bit him. Crazy admission, but useful, too, should he ever be asked any probing questions about the period by, let's say, federal prosecutors. This keeps the Biden Email story relevant and newsworthy.

This was too much for Greenwald. The founder of the Intercept, and six-figure journalist, was being "censored" for the first time in his career and he balked. He tells us that at his previous sites -- Salon and the Guardian -- he had an agreement that his work would go direct to publishing, essentially continuing his blogging career but within the 'folds' of media sites, including, he contends, the Intercept. This is his shtick, his brand, his burnt offering to the middle class masses. Nobody wants to read censored Glenn. Would you? No, we want 'feisty, gay guy beats the snot out of the musclebound Twinkie-thieving teenaged fascist in the schoolyard' while we cheer. Think WWW, Truth vs. Power in a caged grudge match. Bruno Samartino versus the greedy hegemaniac Tasmanian Devil.

But the most humiliating aspect of this "censorship" was that it was to be done by arch colleague James Risen, the Trump card shark. The guy who called him on his motives and politics in that podcast, and thanked Glenn for a nice compliment ("Jim Risen has long been, and still is, one of my heroes in journalism.") by calling the blogging-orator -- incoherent! No way, Jose. Ninja bomb. Glenn walked, and we walked out with him, arms akimbo in solidarity. As Glenn vibes in his piece, we built this city on rock and roll, and not to be "another New York Times." The Intercept was founded by Glenn (and Laura Poitras, who he doesn't even mention as a co-; see my dish on thish) to be a bold alternative to the lapdog, "cowardly" MSM, the NYT being the most mewling pusillanimous putsch pooch of them all. And now this?

Interesting enough, Greenwald doesn't call Risen out on his hypocrisy. The Stellar Wind story quashed all those lost years ago might have made James an old bolshy butch himself (he kind of resembles my memory of Gertrude Stein), but no. Some might even argue that his coverage of Trump over the years had gradually reached the point of losing the plot altogether and was freefalling into the footprints of his own incoherence. What happened to Risen? Can thermite take out a mind? I thought I heard the pop-pop-pop of neurons.

Almost as a sidebar, the "New Proof" Greenwald refers to in his piece is 'testimony' from Politico writer Ben Schreckinger (a German word roughly translated: 'the woods are lovely, dark and deep'), who just put out a book, The Bidens: Inside the First Family's Fifty-Year Rise to Power, in which he posits the proof of Greenwald's putting:

Over the summer, one think tank, the Aspen Institute, even ran a simulation of a scenario in which material from Burisma that seemed to implicate Joe and Hunter leaked in the run-up to Election Day, along with news of a grand jury investigation of the Bidens. Then, on the second Wednesday of October, the Post published its first story based on files that purportedly came from Hunter's laptop. They included an April 2015 email from a Burisma advisor thanking Hunter for arranging a meeting with Joe. The vague email was not exactly a bombshell. But, if it was genuine, it undermined Joe's insistent claims that he remained totally insulated from his relatives' business dealings in general and threatened to renew scrutiny of Hunter's relationship with Burisma in particular. (p.225)

This issue of genuineness is vital to Greenwald, as he reminds the reader that any information is open to the twin questions a journalist faces: Is it real? And is it of Public Interest?

In addition to his long Substack piece, Greenwald embeds an hour long video broadcast from his online series, System Update. Here is a nine-minute excerpt that really lays out his practical philosophy, and includes an instructive (there's always didacticism afoot for the grasshoppers of his wisdom) bit from David Barstow (who broke the Tobacco industry stories). Eight minutes in Barstow describes why it doesn't matter who the documents came from if they are true and of public interest. (Check out how the lighting makes Glenn look like muppet Bert with a whiffle*):

Greenwald's contention is that Barstow's approach was the prevailing journalistic ethos, "until 2021, when the rules were re-written to protect Joe Biden." As far as Greenwald is concerned, this changing rules in mid-stream may be a more important story than whether the Biden Emails provide proof-positive evidence of Uncle Joe's corruption. Greenwald argues that Risen and the Intercept essentially decided that no story would get through that hurt Biden or, conversely, helped Trump in the 2020 election. No matter what. Politics won out over journalism at the Intercept -- just as it had with some frequency at the NYT. Which the Intercept had been founded to counter. Trump had declared the MSM his enemy early on in his presidency -- they were purveyors of Fake News -- and, though not a Trump supporter, Greenwald, as Assange had put before Judy Woodruff, wondered if such blatant political considerations, aside from the obvious hypocrisy, weren't, indeed, part of a partisan Fake News regimen.

On the surface, Greenwald's concern can seem petty. But in light of the way the MSM has powerfully politicized the origins of the Coronavirus, so that career researchers, steeped in the Scientific Method, were out of hand refusing to concede that the virus may have escaped from a Wuhan lab -- even accidentally -- without a full investigation, but due almost entirely to not wanting to be seen as supporters of Trump's proclamations on the matter that blamed China.

(Rudolph Giuliani embarrassingly gave 'the hot tip' to young journalism actor Tatar in Borat's latest film punk: China intentionally spread the virus all around the world. At the very least, he should be wrung up for releasing classified information. Borat rushed in just before Rudy was able to release something else best kept classified. Where's RICO when you need it?)

Some supporters of Greenwald, who think he does, more often than not, speak Truth to Power, can be caught out by some of Greenwald's own opacity and hypocrisy regarding the value of documents, their sources, and interest to the public. I recall, back in 2012, when Greenwald was calling out the intended October Surprise film, Zero Dark Thirty, for being a vehicle of propaganda, going so far as to compare it to the work of Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. Originally scheduled to be released just before the 2012 presidential election, the ensuing controversy stirred up largely by Greenwald forced the film's release to be pushed back to December.

I was a member of his commentariat back then, I used to be among the crowd he's in with, and introduced "proof" of Kathryn Bigelow and the ZDT producers's collusion with the Obama administration in framing the message of the film, including the premise that "torture works," and that the Abbotabad raid went as smoothly as was claimed. My proof was a pdf describing conversations between the WH and ZDT people about the film, including access to classified information about the raid. The Pdf was offered to the public by the right wing Judicial Watch which had obtained the document through a FOIA. Same as the Left does. The document bolstered Greenwald's case. But his white blood cell gangsters came at me, gats and bats -- inferring I was a crypto Righty (me!) -- and telling me what to do with the Pdf. Greenwald never used the document -- because the source was politically incorrect. I felt like I'd had an encounter with Napoleon's fascist mutts from Animal Farm; I got out before I went the way of working class hero Boxer, formerly known as the glue of society. It was a Hurt Locker I opened: BOOM. My heart to smithereens.

There are tough choices ahead for readers: 'coward' vs 'activists.' Conspiracy Fearists versus Conspiracy Theorists. The phony 'objectivity' (even Keller says there's no such thing as objective, only suppression of the subjective) that shields corporate journalists who hide stuff from us vs. out-there types like Glenn Greenwald and Julian Assange and John Pilger, whose personas we need to sometimes accommodate in order to get to 'the revelation' in a meaningful way. Edward Snowden paints the picture well when he describes his relationship to Assange:

It's true that Assange can be self-interested and vain, moody, and even bullying-after a sharp disagreement just a month after our first, text-based conversation, I never communicated with him again-but he also sincerely conceives of himself as a fighter in a historic battle for the public's right to know, a battle he will do anything to win. [p. 228]

I think this moves toward describing a non-Kool-Aid drinker's observation of the doings of Greenwald and his minions. We're just going to have to put up with the thit, if we want to see the swinish epoophany embedded in his caca. He, like Assange, is an enema of the state. It's best to think of the mess they make as the loamy loam out of which will grow the fresh new roses of our tomorrow, new scents for new senses, today's stench tomorrow's Mensch. And Laura, too.

It's not entirely incomprehensible why his acolytes come at one fiercely defending the 'integrity' of their Zen master because their whole shtick depends on his/their being perceived as Speakers of Truth to Power types. Intrepidity is laudable, and Greenwald's has that, but it can go the other way toward cultism. When knowing what to believe comes to which flavor of Kool-Aid you prefer, drinker beware, remember Guyana. Lest We Forget.

Ultimately, the notion of Truth sits uncomfortably with us in the so-called post-Truth era; it can feel awkward believing in Knights of the Round Table, who yearn (lust) for the Grail, like watching countryside bumpkins get a load of Don Quixote as he gives the Windmill the finger. As we apply Truth to journalism we may need to lower our expectations, because as wonderfully liberating as postmodern relativism is (they tell me) it means that a lot of our idealistic rah-rah look at my undies about a whole lot of things needs to change. Probably we haven't reached the end of our delusion's rainbow as a culture, and a period of collapse and depression, akin to Quixote's, is awaiting us, these growing symptoms of our madness a sure indicator of our imminent colonist collapse. In the meantime, let's food fight over politics, cue the soundtrack of a hungry world audience laughing at out hijinks about

(Article changed on Sep 29, 2021 at 7:51 PM EDT)

(Article changed on Sep 30, 2021 at 1:19 AM EDT)

Authors Website: https://tantricdispositionmatrix.substack.com/

Authors Bio:

John Kendall Hawkins is an American ex-pat freelance journalist and poet currently residing in Oceania.