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| 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.
