What happened to Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi?


I used to read and support both of them (I used to send money to Greenwald back at the beginning when he was a mere blogger) but as many observers have noted, they seem to have taken a turn to the right and I no longer seek them out. Will Solomon writes that a new book Owned by Eoin Higgins asserts that their shift is part of a larger program by tech billionaires like Mark Andreesen, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk to buy the loudest voices on the left and right. (The article is behind a paywall so I’ll give just brief excerpts.)

Higgins has done a sort of service for those of us who have watched Greenwald and Taibbi in disbelief, as they’ve contorted themselves into more and more ridiculous positions in obvious deference to wealth and power—particularly wealth and power in the tech sector—and aligned themselves with an ascendant right. Both have repeatedly justified the transformation (a transformation that, to varying degrees, they also deny, instead blaming shifts in liberal culture) under the guise of rejecting corporate censorship and hegemonic liberalism, surfing the same wave of anti–cancel culture hysteria that has degraded public conversation more generally and simplified potentially meaningful debates around power and the consolidation of media into a more easily digestible pill of “liberal elites are muffling conservative voices.” And, of course, both men have gotten very rich doing it.


Without offering a “smoking gun,” because there may be none to be found, [Higgins] suggests that there is a constellation of intersecting factors that have led the two (and presumably others, though lesser names generally appear in passing) to morph into the caricatures they’ve become.

These include, in differing ways, pre-existing ideological proclivities. Higgins covers Greenwald’s mild support for—or credulity toward, depending on your perspective—the Tea Party movement… Greenwald, who was apparently interviewed at length for the book, shows an occasional if self-serving capacity for introspection, and his responses to Higgins’s questions are interesting, if usually predictable.

Taibbi’s politics come across as more unformed, which along with his minimal responses to Higgins makes his recent transformation seem all the more petty (perhaps no image better embodies this than him amicably meeting Ted Cruz).

The probably redundant question we’re left with at the end is—what happens now? The movement Greenwald and Taibbi have championed as anti-establishment, anti-authoritarian, and committed to free speech—which they have tacitly or explicitly endorsed as the lesser of two evils—is coming to power. What posture will the two writers stake out in 2025 and beyond? Will they cozy up closer to their benefactors (and increasingly, far-right readers and viewers) and continue to contort themselves to justify this decision as somehow righteous, descending further into what Higgins calls “parallel media irrelevance”? Or will they risk their careers and financial status and attempt to stake out anything resembling a principled position on freedom of speech, civil liberties, and intellectual independence, the ideas on which they seemingly built their brands? Particularly after reading Owned, I’m not holding my breath.

Ryan Cooper argues that the 2016 election was a key factor in kicking off Greenwald’s transformation.

Greenwald’s turn to the right started around 2016, the election that broke a million brains. He favored Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary, and absolutely despised Hillary Clinton as the inheritor of the Bush-Obama national security state. Almost everyone assumed she would win easily, and so Greenwald (like most of the rest of the media) spent the campaign savagely criticizing Clinton and the Democrats.

Anyway, when Trump scraped out a victory instead, Greenwald was put in an uncomfortable position. It was easy to attack Clinton when she was the presumptive president. But when she lost, it suggested that Greenwald’s fulminating criticisms during the campaign were misplaced, or maybe even helped Trump in a small way.

So there were two options here. Greenwald could admit that he had misjudged the situation and apply the same scrutiny to Trump as he had to Obama, or he could double down on his previous position. No bonus points if you correctly guess where he ended up.

In March 2021 the Financial Times calculated that he was making 1-2 million dollars per year from the newsletter. Then the next year, he got a mid-six-figure contract from the right-wing video site Rumble. You’ll never guess who is a major investor in Rumble—that’s right, the oligarch Peter Thiel, who not only used the court system to bankrupt a publication he didn’t like, but also is openly against democracy. Now that’s what I call free speech and freedom of the press, baby.

But to understand the Greenwald-Substack-Fox News dynamic, you don’t need 411 pages of evidence and argumentation. It goes like this: say right-wing things on TV, get paid lots of money.

I think this puts us in a position to understand how Greenwald became a reactionary. The explanation has economic, psychological, and political elements. It’s not like what happened with Taibbi, where he got used to a comfy lifestyle, got Me-Tooed, and had to start pandering to conservatives to make up for it. Glenn was making lots of money and chose to give it up. But he did so in a way where 1) he ended up making a lot more money 2) didn’t have to admit to himself or anyone else that he was wrong after making a huge mistake, and 3) could indulge a latent bias towards a certain kind of populist-branded racism.

That’s not to say it was a clear-eyed cynical calculation. But money tells, some people will do anything to avoid admitting they are wrong, and association breed assimilation, as they say.

It wasn’t easy, though. This move from center left to far right is a major change in perspective, and a more honest person might come clean with articles or books about how they don’t believe in lefty politics anymore. A lot of former communists did that in the 1950 and 60s. But Greenwald is not honest. He almost never admits fault or hypocrisy. Instead of saying conservatism is good, he concocts preposterous arguments that actually, Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon are the real socialists because they hate immigrants.

I also think this is why he has become so inflamed over the last couple years. As the contrast between his previous position as a normie liberal Democrat and his current position as a conservative Fox News talking head has become ever more glaring, he’s had to ratchet up the hysterics to relieve the cognitive dissonance. His typical rhetorical register these days is flipping the fuck out.

For instance, when whistleblower Chelsea Manning—someone Greenwald had defended on multiple occasions for over a decade—tweeted that “im terrified of you and everything you do. you’re greedy, unprincipled, and im embarrassed for ever considering you a friend,” Glenn characteristically torched what remained of his journalism career by publishing a bunch of their private correspondence. He argued that he was debunking her innuendo, but in reality he was misconstruing Manning’s words. She wasn’t saying she was frightened of what he might do personally, but of the effects of his new politics. But by pretending she was, Greenwald gave himself permission to cruelly lash out at a credible critic.

Just as Greenwald obliterated his legal career by aggressively defending a white supremacist would-be murderer to the extent of violating legal ethics, he’s now obliterated his journalism career by eagerly gulping down wingnut welfare and coming completely unglued at anyone who criticizes him for doing it. He’s 56 years old. Absent some kind of road to Damascus conversion, the rest of his career will be serving as an increasingly less credible leftist useful idiot for conservative media and the vast market of right-wing suckers. Maybe someday he’ll get his own Fox News show. I hope it’s worth it to him, because he certainly ain’t getting any more Pulitzer prizes.

Back in 2021, Nathan J. Robinson also gave a detailed analysis of Greenwald’s and Taibbi’s lurch to the right, that is worth reading.

Now that Trump and his odious crew are taking a wrecking ball to what remains of American democracy, what will Greenwald and Taibbi do? Continue to profitably rail against liberal Democrats (not that there isn’t a lot to criticize) while largely ignoring the much greater danger that confronts the country?

Comments

  1. KG says

    Now that Trump and his odious crew are taking a wrecking ball to what remains of American democracy, what will Greenwald and Taibbi do? Continue to profitably rail against liberal Democrats (not that there isn’t a lot to criticize) while largely ignoring the much greater danger that confronts the country?

    Yes. Whatever atrocities Trump, Musk and their acolytes commit, it will all be the fault of liberal Democrats according to Greenwald and Taibbi -- and many who have somewhat better claims to belong to the left, but have spent the last several years scoffing at the idea that however inadequate (and in regard to Gaza, vile) Biden and Harris have been, they remained the lesser evil, and working to keep Trump, Musk, Thiel and Project 2025 out of power was the only morally acceptable course.

  2. Andrew Wade says

    I suspect Greenwald’s turn to the right in 2016 was a change in his public posture rather than a change in his beliefs. I didn’t clue into him being a reactionary in the early 2000s, but whatever happened to him happened before then. David Neiwert has receipts.

  3. Mano Singham says

    Andrew Wade @#2,

    Thanks so much for that link. It was both illuminating and disturbing.

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