Glenn Greenwald has said and done some things that were (at least at first blush) easy to find fault with. [I know there are other things to link to. But I don't know where to find them. A quick search produced mostly inane drivel from CounterPunch writers who will be discussed below.] I don't agree with all of his views. But unlike stupid, pathetic Democratic Party hacks, I acknowledge that the man has done some pretty stellar work in the defence of civil liberties and as a critic of authoritarian scumbags. Whatever his intentions or motivations his criticisms of the Democratic Party are worth taking seriously. (Of course, all of this is ignored by hack bloggers like "Driftglass" for whom the centrist Democratic leadership can do no wrong. People like him, who happily humiliate and debase themselves to defend the sleazy antics of Hillary Clinton and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz ignore all of Greenwald's cogent commentary, sail on "full steam ahead" and then wonder why they can't mobilize the US-American electorate against a party comprised of Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz and Matt Goetz.)
In a free article on his substack page (I would suggest to anyone with sufficient disposable income take out a paid subscription as Greenwald courageously cut ties with the billionare-funded "The Intercept" when they attempted to censor his writing and he now lives mainly on his freelance writing.) Greenwald hosts an editorial by Darryl Cooper, an apparently moderate conservative, who created a Twitter thread explaining the anger of Trump supporters that went super-viral. The editorial offers a more in-depth explanation of the thinking behind those "tweets."
Now, before I post some selected quotes from the editorial I want to acknowledge that it will be frustrating reading them (and, obviously, the rest of the piece) due to the mewling self-pity and dizzying hypocrisy of Trump supporters worried about voter suppression, electoral integrity and constitutional authority only when it is they who feel they have been cheated. These people have a party where its own leaders have admitted they're trying to suppress likely Democratic Party supporters. They've said nothing about Republican-controlled state election officials providing insufficient numbers of voting machines to Black neighbourhoods forcing (likely) Democratic Party supporters to have to wait HOURS AND HOURS to vote while mostly white voters in known Republican districts can vote with ease.
Parts of the editorial are about how Trumpistas complained about state governors making last-minute changes to electoral proceedings:
Throughout the summer, establishment governors took advantage of COVID to change voting procedures, often over the protests of the state legislatures. It wasn’t only the mass mailing of live ballots: they also lowered signature matching standards, axed existing voter ID and notarization requirements, and more. Many people reading this might think those were necessary changes, either due to the virus or to prevent potential voter suppression. I won’t argue the point, but the fact is that the US Constitution states plainly that “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections... shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof.” As far as conservatives were concerned, state governors used COVID to unconstitutionally usurp their legislatures’ authority to unilaterally alter voting procedures just months before an election in order to help Biden make up for a massive enthusiasm gap by gaming the mail-in ballot system.
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Trump voters were adamant that the governors’ changes to election procedures were unconstitutional. Everything in law is open to interpretation, but it doesn’t require a Harvard Law degree to read Article 1, Section 4 (quoted above) and come to that conclusion. But they also knew the cases wouldn’t see a courtroom until after the election, and what judge was going to make a ruling that would be framed as a judicial coup d’etat just because some governors didn’t go through the proper channels? Even a judge willing to accept the personal risk would have also to be willing to inflict the chaos that would follow on the country.
Unfortunately for them, I wrote recently about pulling out an old issue of "Harper's" at random and reading about Republican-sponsored electoral chicanery and fraud from 2005. Republican voters have sat quietly, uncomplaingingly, as state legislatures dominated by their party have gerrymandered, engaged in voter suppression, dumped voting records, abused the Supreme Court, and generally conducted fraud, election after election. Whatever happened this past US federal election, Republican supporters have no right to portray themselves as spotless innocents being cruelly abused by an evil Democratic Party using Leninist tactics. (A common response of Repubs to the laying out of their own party's fraud has been to refer back to the crimes of LBJ in Texas or JFK in Chicago. A better response would be to admit that dirty election tactics are wrong no matter who does them and to work together to ensure free and fair elections that result in the representation of the electorate's desires.)
But the last thing that I want to say is that despite of the obvious ignorance or hypocrisy displayed by Trump supporters over possible hanky-panky in the 2020 US elections, it is good to have a sober presentation of just what it is exactly that they're crying about and to have an honest, objective response to these concerns. Because those Trump supporters who are simply ignorant of the Republican party's vile history are genuinely (if annoyingly) aggrieved, and a respectful hearing of their case could lower the heat of the political climate in that country.
But here's the section that I find more important: The look at the damage caused by the Democratic leadership's focus on the totally discredited "Russiagate" conspiracy theory:
Many of them deny it now, but a lot of 2016 Trump voters were worried during the early stages of the Russia collusion investigation. True, the evidence seemed thin, and the very idea that the US and allied security apparatus would allow Trump to take office if they really thought he might be under Russian blackmail seemed a bit preposterous on its face. But to many conservatives in 2016 and early 2017, it seemed equally preposterous that the institutions they trusted, and even the ones they didn’t, would go all-in on a story if there wasn’t at least something to it. Imagine the consequences for these institutions if it turned out there was nothing to it.
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It may surprise many liberals, but most conservative normies actually know the Russia collusion case front and back. A whole ecosystem sprouted up to pore over every new development, and conservatives followed the details as avidly as any follower of liberal conspiracy theorists Seth Abramson or Marcy Wheeler.
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Trump supporters had gone from worrying the collusion might be real, to suspecting it might be fake, to seeing proof that it was all a scam. Then they watched as every institution - government agencies, the press, Congressional committees, academia - blew right past it and gaslit them for another year. To this day, something like half the country still believes that Trump was caught red-handed engaging in treason with Russia, and only escaped a public hanging because of a DOJ technicality regarding the indictment of sitting presidents. Most galling, conservatives suspect that within a few decades liberals will use their command over the culture to ensure that virtually everyone believes it.
This is something that I was warning people about a long time ago. That Trump fans were paying attention as the "Russiagate" debacle staggered its way to total debasement.
And that even if you anti-Trump people (mostly liberals) are happy with ignoring these truths and pretending that they didn't happen, Trump's base is going to do the opposite. ... Liberals and progressives! Why oh why did you have to foolishly give support to FAKE NEWS and an ominous WITCH HUNT and thereby give validation to Donald J. Trump's claims and the beliefs of his fans? Because the ends justified the means? Because attacking that monster was more important than not embarrassing yourselves? Because you only made him stronger! Because "Russiagate" being based on fraud, failed utterly. You true believers might have convinced yourselves that Trump is a "Russian usurper" or Putin's butt-boy, and that only his criminal obstruction prevented Mueller from proving this. But it doesn't matter what you believe. It doesn't matter because it's demonstrably not true.
Trump's fans and many "independent voters look at all of this swill and they feel vindicated. You achieve less than nothing. You damage your own cause. You show yourself as hoeplessly partisan and tribal and hypocritical as anyone else.
Just today, the wonderful Caitlin Johnstone mentions how "Russiagate" helps reinforce the distrust of state institutions trying to deal with the COVID pandemic:
Imagine you’re someone on the political right watching this whole thing unfold. Imagine that from late 2016 to mid-2019 you were watching the mass media aggressively shove this story down everyone’s throat that a US president, whom you support, is secretly working for a hostile foreign government with the goal of subverting the United States of America. The media you consume have been highlighting all the massive, glaring plot holes in this narrative the entire time, so you know it’s not true, yet you’ve still got friends, coworkers and family members who believe it is.
Can you imagine how disgusted you’d get with the media watching this happen day after day? How outraged? How resentful? If you’re really putting yourself there, I think you probably can.
Now imagine a year later these exact same media institutions start telling you there’s a novel coronavirus which we’re all going to have to sacrifice some personal liberties in order to stop. We might have to stay in our homes, wear a mask, get injected with new drugs we’re not sure about, possibly while watching our bank account drain and our business go under, and all these media institutions you just watched lie to everyone’s face for years on end are aggressively saying you need to do this and support this or you’re a dangerous monster whose voice should be banned from social media.
How well do you imagine that would go over with you?
Now, obviously, there's a lot of shit-heddery and ignorance on the part of the people denying the reality of the pandemic. (I've seen enought real-world evidence to know personally that the pandemic is genuine. There's no debating on that score.) But why give them ammunition? Why destroy your credibility with something as nonsensical and useless as "Russiagate" thereby nullifying your authority in other areas? It might not seem fair that progressives have to tell the truth while right-wingers get to believe in any fool thing that is placed into their heads. It's NOT fair. But it is tactically smart. And it does us no harm to be the ones with integrity.
What do you imagine was achieved by "Russiagate"? That it put Trump off-balance and distracted during much of his presidency? It's unclear how much Trump was rendered incapable of doing what he wanted to do in other areas besides US-Russian relations. And on US-Russian relations "Russiagate" certainly proved effective at preventing the lowering tensions between Russia and the USA. But this is a bad thing. Because these are both nuclear powers and conflict between them could destroy human civilization. And please don't spew any stupid crap about Putin in the Ukraine or Belorussia or Syria or whatever. Don't spew any stupid crap about Putin's dictatorial tendencies within Russia either. The USA has been rampaging around the world inflicting misery and slaughter on a scale so vast that it dwarfs anything Putin has been up to. And the USA's racist policing and carceral system; it's murdering of left-wing activists; .... it's abuses of the law to persecute human rights and environmental activists; it's brutal, corrupt, inhuman private health profiteering (real traumas, real lives, hundreds of thousands of them every day) make any talk of abuses in Russia only nauseating concern-trolling. "Russiagate's" main achievement was to de-legitimize Trump's progressive opposition. Congratulations.
Next up is the coddling of Joe Biden by progressives and Democratic Party oligarchs and the corporate "liberal" media. This is part and parcel of Joe Biden (like Hillary Clinton before him) being a shitty candidate. I'm long past the point of putting my faith in "lesser evilism" and then being shocked and appalled when the "lesser" evil candidate does evil things and takes us all further down the road to fascism and ecocide. 2015 was the year for the Left to do the hard thinking about how to completely oppose the status-quo and the genuinely resist whatever vomitous candidate the system threw at us.
When it was revealed that Hillary and the DNC cheated Bernie Sanders "progressives" should not have lined up behind her anyway. Now, certainly amoral, idiot scumbags like the hypocritical "Montreal Shithead's" toxic blog-mate "Jackie Blue" honestly love Hillary Clinton. But "Jackie Blue" and others of her ilk aren't "progressive." They're psychopaths.
Joe Biden also won the Democratic nomination through fraud. The Democratic party shamelessly shamed and debased themselves to nullify Bernie Sanders to ensure that Biden won. Biden who opposed racially integrated schools. Biden who built the disgusting prison-industrial-complex. Biden who wrote the precursor to the "Patriot Act." Biden who shepherded a bankruptcy bill through the Senate that benefited Wall Street bankster-types while traumatizing ordinary US-American. Biden whose foreign policy has devastated Central America. Biden who is losing his battle with dementia.
Biden's son Hunter is a train wreak. He's battle with addictions to crack cocaine and otherwise lived the sort of life not generally associated with the Washington elite. If he had been born Black he'd probably serving a twenty-year sentence in a brutal US federal penitentiary by now. But he's white and a senator's son so he gets sympathy and second, third, and fourth chances. Plus, he gets to trade on his father's status and get mafia-like "no show" jobs in Ukrainian energy companies or (most recently) his "art" is being sold at auction to wealthy bidders and the Whitehouse will (nudge-nudge/wink-wink) have NO IDEA who paid Hunter hundreds of thousands of dollars for his mediocre paintings.
At one point, Hunter Biden left one of his laptops at a computer repair shop and forgot about it. The store's owner turned out to be Trump supporter and when he saw what was on the laptop (incriminating photos and documents on all manner of subjects including drug use and official corruption) he turned it over to the FBI and Trump advisor Rudy Giuliani. Subsequently, "Deep State" operatives said (offering absolutely no evidence) that this had all the hallmarks of "Russian disinformation" and progressives debased themselves by insisting that it was a Russian plot and, furthermore, that it was RIDICULOUS to even imagine that a drug-addled imbecile like Biden could have left a laptop at a repair shop and forget about it.
Then came the tech-oligarchy's ominous shutting down of the entire story:
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And then came the Hunter Biden laptop scandal. Liberals dismiss the incident because, after four years of obsessing over the activities of the Trump children, they insist they’re not interested in the behavior of the candidate’s family members. But this misses the point entirely. Big Tech ran a coordinated censorship campaign against a major American newspaper while the rest of the media spread base propaganda to protect a political candidate. And once again, the campaign crossed institutional boundaries, with dozens of former intelligence officials throwing their weight behind the baseless and now-discredited claim that the laptop was part of a Russian disinformation campaign. That lie was promoted by Big Tech companies, while the true information being reported by The New York Post about the laptop’s contents was suppressed. That is what happened.
Even the tech companies themselves now admit it was a “mistake” - Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said it was an error and apologized - but the election is over, Joe Biden has appointed Facebook’s government regulations executive as his ethics arbiter, so who cares, right? It hardly needs saying that if The New York Times had Donald Trump Jr.’s laptop, full of pictures of him smoking crack and engaging in group sex, lots of lurid family drama, and emails with pretty direct discussions of political corruption, the Paper of Record would not have had its accounts suspended for reporting on it. Let’s remember that stories of Trump being pissed on by Russian prostitutes and blackmailed by Putin were promoted as fact across the media spectrum and used as the basis for a multi-year criminal investigation, when the only evidence was a document paid for by his opposition and disavowed by its primary source.
I don't think that I need to add anything to that in order to explain why the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story is an ominous precedent.
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Trump supporters were led down some rabbit holes. But they are absolutely right that the institutions and power centers of this country have been monopolized by a Regime that believes they are beneath representation, and will observe no limits to prevent them getting it. I encourage people on the Left to recognize the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity in front of them. You’re not going to agree with the conservatives on everything. But if in 2004 I had told you that the majority of the GOP voter base would soon be seeing the folly of the Iraq War, becoming skeptical of state surveillance, and beginning to see the need for action to help the poor and working classes, you’d have told me such a thing would transform the country. Take the opportunity. These people are not demons, and they are ready to listen in a way they haven’t in a long, long time.
Is it really the case that we might have some potential allies on the political right as a result of the obvious futility and evil of imperialism/the spread of genuine unease against ceaseless, all-encompassing surveillance/the fall-out from brazen Wall Street corruption and corporate greed? The notion of finding common cause with right-wingers is a theme that I've brought up from time to time at this blog. Generally, my answer has been negative.
But that answer is primarily directed at the internet blowhards who imagine that they're "thinkers" of great import. These [mainly] guys who have concocted quite complicated worldviews and, more, are not above ignoring superior criticisms, or even lying, so as to be able to "win" a debate and carry on in their delusions. And, scanning over possible blog posts of mine to reinforce my self-proclaimed reasonableness I only find post after post trashing Trump voters are deplorable, disgusting, hypocritical whining scumbag shit-heads. Oh well. I'm sure there's one or two examples wherein I have stated that some right-wingers are mainly ignorant and therefore redeemable. Besides, it's not as if I'm not given to sweeping caustic generalizations about Hillary supporters! 😋
I cannot believe that the 73 million people who voted for Trump in 2020 are thoroughly fascist. (Especially since it's been noted that some 2016 Trump voters had previously voted for Obama.) I didn't believe it in 2016. I don't dispute that Republican voters tend to skew affluent. I maintain that the main cause of Hillary Clinton's Electoral College loss in 2016 was more due to lower-income Democratic voters failing to vote for her after she shit all over them. But I think the contention of some left-wing writers (mostly at CounterPunch but also some other sites) that there is no significant working class support for Trump to be questionable. I've seen these people with my own eyes. I think what has happened with these writers is that they've been seduced by data and they can't conceive of the possibility that data collection can be flawed. There's simply too much physical evidence (rural counties across entire MidWest states festooned with pro-Trump signs, etc.) to deny the fact that many working class voters have turned to Trump. Grim economic times make people "conservative." Danger stimulates the amygdala. When people are in a desperate struggle for survival (due to unemployment and austerity) other people become competitors and therefore threats. You build walls around yourself to keep other people out. Both the Democrats and the Republicans have devastated the livelihoods of ordinary US-Americans. That's why Trump was able to bulldoze his way through the other aspiring Repug candidates in 2015. They were all peddling the same neo-liberal snakeoil whereas Trump (both independently wealth and, at first, unconcerned about winning) was talking about trashing "free trade" deals and bring the factories back.
Oh well, anyway, ... I think I'll end this post here. I've established the counterproductive nature of silly things like "Russiagate" via that Darryl Cooper piece, plus the other stuff he said. We on the Left need to be much more appreciative of the value of the truth. Especially tactically. COVID-deniers/anti-Vaxxers are self-evidently dangerous. Yes, they're delusional and they live in their own bubbles and they're almost impervious to facts and arguments. But to demolish our own credibility by telling stupid lies that really bring us no benefit, gives them fuel to deny us when we're telling the truth. I'll make the reaction to Glenn Greenwald, Bernie Sanders, Matt Taibbi, Jimmy Dore and Caitlin Johnstone, who seek to make appeals to right-wingers, my next post.
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