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.

Occupy Wall Street Jumps the Shark

From today's Front Page Magazine:

Occupy Wall Street Jumps the Shark

By Matthew Vadum

It hasn’t taken long for the socialist-organized “occupation” of Wall Street to jump the shark.

In a surreal news conference at the United Nations, anti-American radical and rogue financier George Soros (net worth: $22 billion) threw in his lot with the thousands of Communists, anarchists, eco-feminists, malingerers, and professional protesters who have been baiting and taunting police in lower Manhattan as part of a mass demonstration that began September 17.

Congressman Ron Paul (R-TX) also jumped on the anti-Wall Street bandwagon. In a move that ought to permanently disqualify him as a GOP presidential candidate, Paul gave aid and comfort to the radicals who want to destroy America. “If they were demonstrating peacefully, and making a point, and arguing our case, and drawing attention to the Fed — I would say, good!” Paul said.

When told that a New York police officer pepper-sprayed protesters, Paul reflexively took the side of the radicals. “I didn’t read the stories about it. But that means government doesn’t like to be receiving any criticism at all. And my argument is, government should be in the open — the people’s privacy ought to be protected. So I don’t like it.”

The protests, which have spread to other large cities, are part of what ACORN’s neo-communist founder Wade Rathke calls an “anti-banking jihad.” Not surprisingly, the remnants of the ACORN network are deeply involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement. New York ACORN’s new front group, New York Communities for Change (NYCC), led by veteran ACORN enforcer Jon Kest, is one of the major protest groups leading the effort to turn America into one big socialist armpit.

Kest explained why NYCC is involved by using what has become the standard Marxist boilerplate about the financial collapse. “When the big banks tanked our economy they took away millions of people’s shot at achieving the American Dream,” he blogged. “It’s about time all these people come together and hold Wall Street accountable for what they’ve done to our futures and the future of this country.” Of course Kest didn’t bother to mention the role that ACORN played in creating the mortgage bubble by strong-arming Fannie Mae, pushing the financial affirmative action scheme known as the Community Reinvestment Act, and blackmailing banks that didn’t want to lend money to people who wouldn’t be able to pay it back.

SEIU board member Stephen Lerner has vowed to do his part to drive a stake through the heart of capitalism and drag the populace into economic misery. Lerner says he wants to “bring down the stock market” through a campaign of disruption. Last year George Goehl, executive director of Chicago-based National People’s Action, said that “the banking crisis” was “the next big thing,” and “the way to build a big economic justice movement in this country.”

Soros said he sympathizes with the rabble. “Actually I can understand [the protesters’] sentiment, frankly,” said the preeminent funder of the American activist Left in remarks to reporters.

But anyone who has followed Soros’s life wouldn’t dare to describe him as a working class hero.

Remember that this corrupt investment banker fired his butler for complaining after his cook used Château Lafite in a stew. The butler won a wrongful dismissal lawsuit against Soros. Soros was also convicted of insider trading. A French court fined him millions of dollars.

Soros’s hedge fund invested almost $1 billion in shares of Petrobras, the Brazilian oil concern, coincidentally just before the Export-Import Bank of the United States announced it was lending $2 billion to the company.
Soros closed a hedge fund to outside investors rather than submit to the new Dodd-Frank financial regulations – regulations he helped to enact by giving money to groups that lobbied for them. Soros shed a few crocodile tears for small business owners whose credit lines got squeezed after the 2008 financial collapse. “An awful lot of them actually were put out of business,” he said.

Remember also that Soros deliberately collapses national economies for fun and profit, openly expresses admiration for Communist China, and has said European-style socialism “is exactly what we need now.” He wants the American economy to sink into the abyss. “I’m having a very good crisis,” Soros said in 2009.

Even though Soros is the archetype of the Wall Street insider, leftists can’t bring themselves to criticize him, preferring to demonize the invented billionaire bogeymen of the Right.

Plenty of other rich liberals have been holding court near Wall Street in recent days.

Hip hop and credit card mogul Russell Simmons (net worth: $340 million), alleged comedian Roseanne Barr (net worth: $80 million), actress Susan Sarandon (net worth: $50 million), and celluloid propagandist Michael Moore (net worth: $50 million) have all dropped by to cheer on the protesters in their quest to redistribute wealth while radically transforming the nation.



Simmons stood beside Frances Fox Piven as the Bolshevik academic unwittingly created an impromptu parody of the “we’re all individuals” crowd scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian. “Wall Street is the center of the neo-liberal cancer that has spread across the world,” Piven said, pausing every few seconds to allow the mob to repeat her words.



After Piven finished, Simmons stood up and did the same routine like an automaton from a creepy cult. As the mob repeated his words, Simmons condemned the “class warfare being waged on the poor and the middle class” and claimed:

The fact is our problem, at least our number one problem, is the corporations and the other special interest groups that are more important to our politicians than the people. The lobbyists and the money gotta get the f*** out of Washington.

The next big exercise in Marxist mobocracy is scheduled for later this week in the nation’s capital.

The October 2011 Coalition plans to take over Freedom Plaza near the White House, beginning today “if any U.S. troops, contractors, or mercenaries remain in Afghanistan.” Protesters will “resist the corporate machine” by occupying the area “to demand that America’s resources be invested in human needs and environmental protection instead of war and exploitation.” The group’s stated goal is to make the plaza one block away from the White House “our Tahrir Square, Cairo.”

Plenty more disruptive demonstrations are scheduled.

Next week will be busy, SEIU’s Lerner said during a panel discussion Monday at the Take Back the American Dream conference in Washington, D.C. sponsored by the left-wing Campaign for America’s Future.

About 10,000 demonstrators are expected to hit the streets of Chicago while protesters march on Wells Fargo in Minneapolis, he said.

Activists in New York are planning to campaign to extend that state’s tax on millionaires. “We may go visit some of them,” said Lerner, whose union goons have terrorized the families of many corporate executives in their homes.

Goehl’s National People’s Action group is planning a “Make Wall Street Pay” event on November 3. That’s two days before Guy Fawkes Day, the annual commemoration of the Gunpowder Plot in which English dissidents plotted to vaporize Parliament.

Fancy that.

* * * * *

Americans need to know that ACORN is restructuring in time to help re-elect President Obama in 2012. Obama used to work for ACORN and represented the group in court as its lawyer. These radical leftists who use the brutal, in-your-face, pressure tactics of Saul Alinsky want to destroy America as we know it and will use any means to do it.

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