Glenn Greenwald: Raving Leftist

My article from the March 6, 2014 issue of FrontPage magazine:

Photo: courtesy of USASurvival.org

Glenn Greenwald: Raving Leftist

By Matthew Vadum

Adding to a long tradition of misleading the public with dubious information, Princeton history professor Sean Wilentz recently unleashed a scathing attack on Edward Snowden promoter Glenn Greenwald in a 7,600-word essay published by The New Republic. Although Wilentz never comes out and says it directly, the reader is left with the distinct impression that he believes neo-communist Greenwald shouldn’t be considered a member-in-good-standing of the Left. In fact, Wilentz seems to insinuate that Greenwald is an extreme right-winger at heart, a proposition that cannot survive serious scrutiny.

An unabashed partisan Democrat, Wilentz is known for his televised histrionics on the eve of President Clinton’s impeachment. He warned House members that if they voted to impeach Clinton, “history will track you down and condemn you for your cravenness.” TheNew York Times ridiculed him for his outburst, editorializing that his “gratuitously patronizing presentation … marred the Democratic experts’ argument that Mr. Clinton’s misconduct did not meet the constitutional tests for impeachment.”

In the article on Greenwald, whom Rachel Maddow calls “the American left’s most fearless political commentator,” Wilentz artfully suggests that Greenwald might be a right-wing crypto-critic of the president and the Left because he is a zealot on so-called privacy issues and has ferociously attacked the Obama administration for its NSA spying abuses. Instead of making a clear accusation of ideological infidelity against Greenwald, Wilentz cherry-picks statements from Greenwald’s past to put him in the same ideological camp as Ron Paul “paleoconservatives,” who support income tax abolition, isolationism, among other things.

As evidence, Wilentz cites Greenwald’s dalliances with members of the Right in the past. Despite being a crusader for gay rights, in Greenwald’s “online travels, he gravitated to right-wing sites such as Townhall, where he could engage in cyber-brawls with social conservatives,” Wilentz writes. ”Over time, he met some of his antagonists in the flesh and, to his surprise, liked them.”

Greenwald’s work has certainly endeared him to libertarians, with whom the lawyer-turned-journalist has had associations over the years, but the simpler explanation for his outreach is that politics makes strange bedfellows. Just because Greenwald elevates the surveillance issue over all others doesn’t mean he stopped being a dogmatic leftist.

And there is no doubt Greenwald is a committed radical leftist.

It’s doubtful that America could ever move far enough to the left to satisfy Greenwald — the recipient of an award named in honor of Soviet agent and left-wing journalist, I.F. Stone. Greenwald doesn’t want to change a few policies here and there; He wants to overthrow the system and his life’s work is clearly dedicated to precisely that.

Book Review: A Leftist's Harsh Words for the Unholy Alliance

My book review from the July 12, 2013 issue of FrontPage Magazine:

A Leftist's Harsh Words for the Unholy Alliance

By Matthew Vadum

It isn’t often that a leftist thought leader calls out her comrades for aligning themselves with the Islamist enemies of the United States but that’s exactly what Meredith Tax does in her new book.

In Double Bind: The Muslim Right, the Anglo-American Left, and Universal Human Rights, published recently by the Centre for Secular Space, Tax claims that a fierce struggle is underway worldwide between Islamic fundamentalists and secularists who favor the separation of religion and the state. (Tax is U.S. Director and head writer for the Centre, which she describes as a London-based think tank “formed to oppose fundamentalism, strengthen secular voices, and promote universality in human rights.”)

If this is true, it is a fairly well-guarded secret. The secularists haven’t won many battles in recent decades. Church-state separation remains as strange and foreign a concept in the Islamic world as shareholder dividends might be in Stalinist North Korea.

Even the military ouster of Mohammed Morsi on July 3 isn’t necessarily a sign that Egyptians are embracing secular democracy. Egyptians didn’t like Morsi for a host of reasons but that doesn’t mean they won’t remain largely supportive of Islamization and the imposition of Shariah law in their country. Islamists won’t sit still while Egypt slips from their grasp.

These secularists that Tax writes of are those unicorns that in the West the mainstream media call moderate Muslims. We keep hearing about these people, and occasionally a few surface for TV cameras, but in most of the Ummah they have no real political power. Islam is not known for embracing pluralism. There may be some secularists in the Islamic world who struggle heroically for freedoms Americans and Europeans taken for granted, and we may admire their bravery and perseverance, but unfortunately in the end they count for little.

As the totalitarian Islamic juggernaut sweeps across Africa and Islamism becomes even more solidly entrenched in the Middle East (thanks in part to Obama administration policies), those who endorse Western-style notions of human rights are increasingly marginalized, terrorized, and liquidated by the powers that be.