Mike Huckabee
Think censorship by the media and Big Tech over the “Biden Inc.” story is bad? Oh, it’s even worse than that. Here’s another example...
Glenn Greenwald has resigned from THE INTERCEPT, the publication he co-founded in 2013, after the editors censored a piece he’d written that they deemed critical of the Bidens.
On Wednesday, he posted a resignation letter on Twitter, saying his editors had, in violation of his contract, refused to publish an article of his unless he deleted “all sections critical of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, the candidate vehemently supported by all New York-based INTERCEPT editors involved in this effort at suppression.”
Note that Greenwald is no right-winger; THE INTERCEPT has always leaned left.
Greenwald’s letter is now posted at an independent publishing site called SUBSTACK (the implication being that Twitter censored him too). He joins journalists Matt Taibbi and Andrew Sullivan in moving to that site.
Ironically, it was constraints on Greenwald’s reporting of the Edward Snowden story in 2013 that caused him to co-found a new site that would give him the ability to report more freely. “The reason it was created,” he said to Tucker Carlson Wednesday night, “was to ensure that journalists would always have complete journalistic independence and editorial freedom –- never have to pull punches journalistically or pay homage to pieties because of the...partisan or ideological preferences of editors or of anybody else. That was the core founding idea and vision.”
But now the outlet he created to avoid censorship is intervening to censor HIM, just a few days before an election. This was because he “wanted to publish reporting and analysis about the evidence that raises serious questions about the conduct of the candidate that all of the editors at that outlet vehemently and enthusiastically support.”Greenwald isn’t American, but after dealing with his New York editors, he said his choice to resign reflects a trend of “repression, censorship and ideological homogeneity plaguing the national press.”
As he said in his resignation letter, those editors even demanded that he “refrain from exercising a separate contractual right to publish this article with any other publication.” Ah, so they really were pulling out all the stops to try to bury it.
Greenwald appears to be caught between the prevailing political forces of the day. As THE EPOCH TIMES put it, “Before President Donald Trump was elected in 2016, Greenwald’s reporting and commentary were influential among anti-war and civil liberties groups on the left. However, since the last election, he has drawn criticism for his appearances on FOX NEWS.”
Knowing Trump as I do, it doesn’t surprise me that Trump is being looked upon more kindly these days by some who are anti-war and pro-civil liberties. Those don’t seem to be leftist views any longer. In fact, Trump is the President who has brought long-antagonistic countries to the peace table and is bringing troops home. He’s also defending constitutional rights to free speech and free assembly, while the left is doing just the opposite in an attempt to clamp down on opposition.
Greenwald said in his statement that his right to journalistic independence was being “suppressed by an authoritarian, fear-driven, repressive editorial team in New York bent on imposing their own ideological and partisan preferences on all writers, while ensuring that nothing is published at THE INTERCEPT that contradicts their own narrow, homogenous ideological and partisan views, exactly what THE INTERCEPT, more than any other goal, was created to prevent.”
Greenwald has had trouble with his editors before by daring to assert that the conclusion Trump was “colluding” with Russia was not supported by evidence. For that, he said, he was branded as a “Trump supporter,” which, to these editors, must have been the worst thing you can call a person.
In 2019, in an interview with THE HILL about the Russia investigation, he said, “These kinds of scandals get conflated into tribalistic and ideological litmus tests, so that you’re required to say that you’re on the side of the anti-Trump forces and believe things that you don’t actually believe are true upon pain of being accused of being a Trump supporter.”
Ask any conservative in Hollywood if that's not true.
Greenwald explained that THE INTERCEPT was intended to be unique for another reason: its skepticism, particularly towards intelligence agencies. At the time it was founded, they were reporting on Ed Snowden and Wikileaks and were under heavy fire from the CIA, NSA, and “deep state.”
"We knew they were lying constantly,” he said, “and disseminating propaganda in a very powerful way. So we set out to say, ‘We’re going to investigate them, and we’re going to be skeptical of them; we’re going to subject their assertions to critical scrutiny.” Now, he’s embarrassed and angry that the very outlet he co-created published an article that snidely dismissed the Biden story as “Russian disinformation” that no one should pay attention to.
The topper: In support of that view, it cited a letter from John Brennan, James Clapper...and “the rest of the goons from the CIA and the intelligence community asserting it,” even though they admitted in the same letter that they had no evidence of “Russian disinformation." THE INTERCEPT conveniently left that last part out. I’m sure Brennan and Clapper and the rest of the goons would approve.
This is the opposite of what Greenwald created THE INTERCEPT to be. It now accepts as gospel whatever the intel community says, even though “there’s never been any evidence that [the “Russian disinformation” story has] been true and everything since has disproven it.”
"Nobody,” he said, “certainly not even Joe Biden, disputes that these emails and other text messages are completely real and authentic.”
He made the point that for years, the left had “a healthy skepticism of the CIA” that went along with their anti-war activism, but that in recent years, “that has all disappeared.” He says this is because the CIA devoted itself from the very first to “sabotaging Trump.” Greenwald dared to question just a few things they held sacred, and “whoever does that must be destroyed,” he said. The CIA and “deep state” became “heroes of the liberal left, the people who support the Democratic Party.”
This “union of power,” he said, is now the deep state --- especially the CIA ('who lie for a living') --- plus “the neo-cons, the Bush-Cheney operatives, Silicon Valley and Wall Street...along with mainstream media outlets that are fully behind the Democratic Party, which is likely to at least take over one branch of government if not all of them in the coming election.”
I’m much more optimistic about the outcome of the election than Greenwald is, but he’s right to say that the prospect is “a very alarming proposition, because they’re authoritarian, they believe in censorship, and they believe in suppression of information that exposes them in any kind of a critical light.”
The CIA was never supposed to be involved in our politics. As Greenwald pointed out, we now have ex-agents of the CIA, NSA, DOJ and FBI infiltrating the media and telling us what we ought to believe, utilizing lies, leaks and clandestine operations. I'll say it: if we don't clean house and find honest media alternatives, we truly will be living in a banana republic, forced to pass those "tribalistic and ideological litmus tests" imposed by the left.