And so it appears that just as the Trump administration may be grinding at last to its operatic conclusion, the eerily parallel trajectory of Glenn Greenwald is experiencing its own Götterdämerung. Greenwald has now completed his transformation—begun during the Trump candidacy four years ago—from crusading civil liberties advocate into craven mouthpiece for Trump and Putin's propaganda.
We watched him appear as a regular guest on Tucker Carlson. We saw him cited with approval by Russian state-owned media. It made our stomachs turn. We didn't want to believe it. Was this really the man who broke the Edward Snowden story?
Is this the same Greenwald who presented himself as a defender of democratic rights and an opponent of the "War on Terror"? Can we truly believe our eyes when we see him now backing up the lies of rightist would-be autocrats who are in the process of conducting multiple devastating and human rights-denying wars in the Middle East and Africa?
We each had a different breaking point. But eventually for all of us (and finally for his employers at the Intercept) Greenwald went too far. The last straw at his home outlet appears to have been his attempt to pass off Russian- and Trump-backed disinformation about the Bidens as legitimate journalism.
For all of us who at one time or another looked up to Greenwald as a leader of the cause, I can do no better than once again cite Browning's poem about Wordsworth's transformation into an arch-conservative. Let these words stand as a monument over every left-wing career betrayed, every writer or artist who once appeared a champion of human rights and liberties and later deserted them:
Blot out his name, then, record one lost soul more,
One task more declined, one more footpath untrod, [...]
Best fight on well, [...]
Then let him receive the new knowledge and wait us,
Pardoned in heaven, the first by the throne!
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