In today's #vatnik soup I'll be introducing an American journalist, author and lawyer, Glenn Greenwald. He's best known for revealing the classified documents from Edward Snowden about the American and British surveillance programs.
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Greenwald started blogging about national security after 9/11. Based on his 2006 book, "How Would a Patriot Act?" he was strongly in support for the Iraq war and had wrote that "I had not abandoned my trust in the Bush administration".
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At some point he's worldview seemed to shift more towards anti-Americanism & he became increasingly critical of "mainstream media". Many have characterized Greenwald as being on the "political Left", but to be honest I don't even know what that means policy-wise these days.
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Before becoming a journalist, Greenwald was working as a lawyer. In 1996, he co-founded his own law firm, Greenwald Christoph & Holland. The company focused on cases concerning issues of civil rights and the constitutional law of the US.
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One of Greenwald's customers was neo-nazi Matthew Hale. Hale was the founder of the New Church of the Creator - a racist, holocaust-denying, homophobic religious movement. Hale had studied law & by his own words, wanted to be an "advocate for white people in the courtroom"...5/24 https://t.co/4NWnDQ0rVO
...and be an "open racist" lawyer. Hale was denied of this right, and Glenn started defending him in the courts. Eventually Hale lost the case, and two days later one of his disciples - whom Hale had just named "Creator of the Month" - went on a killing spree, killing 3...
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...and injuring 10.The Center for Constitutional Rights started a lawsuit on behalf of the victims against Hale & his church. Glenn commented on this case: "I find that the people behind these lawsuits are truly so odious and repugnant, that creates its own motivation for me"7/24 https://t.co/rmLDscZYKf
Glenn later on went and recorded interviews with witnesses without their knowledge or permission. Hale was arrested in Jan, 2003, for conspiring to murder a judge, and was sentenced to 40 years in prison, thus ending the collaboration between the two.
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Greenwald has also been connected to Andrew Auernheimer, a hacker better known as weev. Weev is best-known for his neo-Nazi, white supremacist views and for acting as the webmaster of the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer.
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In the early 2000s, Glenn was involved in LGBT journalism and porn production. He was one of the co-owners of StudMall, a gay porn DVD site, and Hairy Studs Videos, and wrote columns for HX Magazine. He admitted the co-ownership of the companies but suggested that his ...
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...involvement in the porn industry ended already in 2004, 2-3 years after it actually started. Greenwald had also created a fake persona, "Curtis Jacobs", who ran websites like http://RioMaleEscorts.com and http://RioGayGuides.com.
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He then advertised these sites under his real name together with his partner, David Miranda, in ads-disguised-as-articles on HX Magazine. It also seems that Greenwald was promoting Miranda's sexual services through these websites.
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Greenwald and Laura Poitras rose to fame after Edward Snowden shared sensitive documents exposing a large-scale global and domestic surveillance under the Obama administration. These revelations were published by The Guardian in 2013 and the incident was featured in ...
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... an award-winning documentary Citizenfour. He co-founded the news organization The Intercept with Poitras and Jeremy Scahill in 2014, but left the company in 2020 after complaining of censorship and heavy-handed editing.
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In 2015, Greenwald suggested that the "the 'moderate' Free Syrian Army was largely a myth" and that the opposition was actually led by "various Al Qaeda manifestations and even more extreme elements". Glenn's source for this was Syrian Vice-Foreign Minister, Faisal Mekdad.
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Greenwald has been a harsh critic of the "Russiagate", calling it "wildly exaggerated hysteria and the kind of jingoistic fear-mongering". This rhetoric is very much in line with The Grayzone's blogger Aaron Maté, and they have spoken about it on Maté's "Pushback" podcast.
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He's constantly spoken about the "Azov nazis" and how they've been whitewashed by the press. He's also referred to the Azovstal defenders as "real Nazis". Alasdair McCallum has written a good article on Azov, you can read it here: https://lens.monash.edu/@politics-society/2022/08/19/1384992/much-azov-about-nothing-how-the-ukrainian-neo-nazis-canard-fooled-the-world
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Glenn, riddle me this: if they were the real nazis and the war is about eradicating them, why did Putin trade them for his buddy oligarch Viktor Medvedchuk?
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Greenwald has also shown support for the Russia's March 2022 disinformation campaign about "bioweapons labs in Ukraine". Journalist Justin Ling suggested that the conspiracy spread from QAnon channel to Fox News and from there to Donald Trump Jr. Tucker Carlson of ...
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... Fox News claimed that the US was "funding the creation of deadly pathogens" in Ukraine. Greenwald was one of the guests in Carlson's multi-episode story that mostly focused on Russian and Chinese sources. Of course the problem with this whole debate is that many ...
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...people use biolabs and bioweapons labs interchangeably. In the attached map you can see the various biolabs in the vicinity of Helsinki, Finland. Many of these have been co-funded by Chinese and US institutions, yet they haven't used it as casus belli against Finland.
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And yes, some of these biolabs have "deadly pathogens". To conclude, Carlson's rant on bioweapons labs in Ukraine is full-on pro-Russian propaganda (the word "weapons" appears 21 times in this segment; "secret" comes up 19 times) and Greenwald was happy to take...
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...part in this absurd show. It'll be interesting to see how Glenn spins the story about Tucker Carlson wanting to fire co-worker Jacqui Heinrich for not finding evidence on vote system manipulation during the 2020 US presidential election.
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From "the American left's most fearless political commentator" to "bomb-throwing media-critic", these days Glenn visits often Carlson's show (between 2017-2021 he was a guest 40 times) and shares content by figures like Jack Posobiec, Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene.
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Related soups:
Russiagate: https://twitter.com/P_Kallioniemi/status/1617852982095405056
Russian nazis: https://twitter.com/P_Kallioniemi/status/1597153011838513152